When comparing Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks in the context of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), it's important to consider the strengths and focus areas of each vendor's offerings. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud designed for managing cloud security risks, ensuring compliance, and automating governance across cloud environments.
Defender provides a unified security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and it is particularly well-integrated with Azure services, although it also supports multi-cloud environments to an extent. Defender receives positive feedback for its threat protection, seamless integration with Microsoft tools, and reasonable pricing options. Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive cloud-native security platform that integrates security across the full development lifecycle and cloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The solution is commended for its robust security features, and comprehensive compliance capabilities.
The summary above is based on 134 interviews we conducted recently with Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The product supports out-of-the-box reporting with context about the asset and allows us to perform complex custom queries on UI."
"Out of all the features, the one item that has been most valuable is the fact that Wiz puts into context all the pieces that create an issue, and applies a particular risk evaluation that helps us prioritize when we need to address a misconfiguration, vulnerability, or any issue that would put our environment into risk."
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The automation roles are essential because we ultimately want to do less work and automate more. The dashboards are easy to read and visually pleasing. You can understand things quickly, which makes it easy for our other teams. The network and infrastructure teams don't know as much about security as we do, so it helps to have a tool that's accessible and nice to look at."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."
"Defender is user-friendly and provides decent visibility into threats."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the remote workforce capabilities and the general experience of the remote workforce."
"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."
"One of the features that I like about the solution is it is both a hybrid cloud and also multi-cloud. We never know what company we're going to buy, and therefore we are ready to go. If they have GCP or AWS, we have support for that as well. It offers a single-panel blast across multiple clouds."
"Everything is built into Azure, and if we go for cross-cloud development with Azure Arc, we can use most of the features. While it's possible to deploy and convert third-party applications, it is difficult to maintain, whereas Azure deployments to the cloud are always easier. Also, Microsoft is a big company, so they always provide enough support, and we trust the Microsoft brand."
"The integration with Logic Apps allows for automated responses to incidents."
"The most valuable feature is that the rule set is managed and that it can be run on a regularly scheduled basis."
"CSPM is the most valuable feature for any organization that runs its workloads in the cloud."
"The Twistlock vulnerability scanning tool is its most valuable feature. It provides us insight into security vulnerabilities, running inside both on-premise and public cloud-based container platforms. It is filling a gap that we have with traditional vulnerability scanning tools, where we don't have the ability to scan inside containers."
"Prisma Cloud's most important feature is its auto-remediation."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"Cloud security posture management is the preferred feature among other vendors."
"Integration is very easy. And because it supports security that spans multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, it's very easy to use."
"The two most valuable features are container security and the capability to discover workloads."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"Given the level of visibility into all the cloud environments Wiz provides, it would be nice if they could integrate some kind of mechanism to better manage tenants on multiple platforms. For example, let's say that some servers don't have an application they need, such as an antivirus. Wiz could include an API or something to push those applications out to the servers. It would be great if you could remedy these issues directly from the Wiz platform."
"We wish there were a way, beyond providing visibility and automated remediation, to wait on a given remediation, due to a critical aspect, such as the cost associated with a particular upgrade... We would like to see preventive controls that can be applied through Wiz to protect against vulnerabilities that we're not going to be able to remediate immediately."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."
"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."
"From a compliance standpoint, they can include some more metrics and some specific compliances such as GDPR."
"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."
"It needs to be simplified and made more user-friendly for a non-technical person."
"As an analyst, there is no way to configure or create a playbook to automate the process of flagging suspicious domains."
"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."
"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."
"Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."
"The automation must continue to become much smoother."
"It would be nice Prisma Cloud merged its modules for CSPM and infrastructure as code. It would simplify the pricing and make it easier for customers to evaluate the solution because there are different modules, and you need to add it to your subscription separately."
"Areas like the deployment of their defenders and their central control need manual intervention. They should focus more on automation. They have a very generic case for small companies. However, for bigger companies to work, we have to do a lot of changes to our system to accommodate it. Therefore, they should change their system or deployment models so it can be easy to integrate into existing architectures."
"The information presented in the UI sometimes doesn't look intuitive enough."
"The area for improvement is less about the product and more about the upsell. If we've already agreed that we'd like your product x, y, or z, don't try to add fries to my burger. I don't need it."
"The access controls for our bank roles were not granular enough. We needed specific people to do particular actions, and we often had to give some people way too much access for them to be able to do what they needed in Prisma. They couldn't do their jobs if they didn't have that level of access, so other people had to do that part for them. It would help to have more granular role-based access controls."
"The challenge that Palo Alto and Prisma have is that, at times, the instructions in an event are a little bit dated and they're not usable. That doesn't apply to all the instructions, but there are times where, for example, the Microsoft or the Amazon side has made some changes and Palo Alto or Prisma was not aware of them. So as we try to remediate an alert in such a case, the instructions absolutely do not work. Then we open up a ticket and they'll reply, "Oh yeah, the API for so-and-so vendor changed and we'll have to work with them on that." That area could be done a little better."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 82 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "The dashboard is very user-friendly and can be used to generate custom RQL based on user requirements". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Sentinel and Azure Firewall, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Aqua Cloud Security Platform, AWS Security Hub, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, AWS GuardDuty and Snyk. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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