I evaluated Snyk, which is a competitively priced product. However, I personally am not very familiar with how it works or the benefits gained by the different clients I've worked with, as I haven't had much experience with it. I conducted a couple of use cases and found it to be quite similar to Prisma Cloud in terms of features, although the interface has a different look and feel. I have been informed that Snyk is considerably cheaper compared to Prisma Cloud.

We evaluated multiple products. Zscaler was one of them.

I evaluated Lacework, Sysdig Secure, and Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, though I see them more as Veracode than CSP competitors. I didn't find any products that compare to what Prisma Cloud does.

We evaluated Wiz and CrowdStrike. We initially started with CSPM, so Prisma Cloud was more flexible. The representative of the Prisma Cloud CSPM was better and more user-friendly. It gave us more permissions, more controls, and it wasn't complex. We could still do whatever we wanted if it was not given by Prisma out of the box. Therefore, we chose Prisma Cloud.

We evaluated solutions from Cato Networks and Palo Alto. Because we have quite a large installation of Palo Alto's firewall and in-depth knowledge of this technology, we decided to adopt Prisma Cloud.

We are having conversations with Citrix to evaluate their solution.

I know the team evaluated other options, but I wasn't involved.

Wiz was one of the tools we looked at. I was not the only one who made the choice, but we went with Prisma because of its capabilities as well as the support. We are investing a lot in Palo Alto Networks, meaning we use a lot of their products, so we know the enterprise itself. We know the quality of their catalog of services.

We evaluated several other products such as DivvyCloud, Dome9, and a product by Sophos.

We did a full comparison matrix and rationalization of each of the capabilities. Our sister company was using DivvyCloud at the time and as we do from time to time, we conferred with them about what their likes and dislikes were. They were moderately pleased with it but ultimately, we ended up going with Palo Alto.

We have looked at other options on the market. We did look at Microsoft Defender and Sentinel One. They both lacked the features we needed. 

We looked at some solutions to improve security posture and risk management. Prisma was the product that had the capabilities we need in our price range.

If we had gone with the regular Azure solution, some of the concerns were the logging, monitoring, and search capabilities. If something was getting blocked how would we detect that? The troubleshooting was very complicated. That is why we went with Prisma Cloud, for the troubleshooting.

Microsoft is not up to where Palo Alto is, right now. Maybe in six months or a year, they will have some comparable capabilities, but as of now, there is no competitor.

Before choosing the Palo Alto product we checked Cisco and Fortinet. In my experience, it seemed that Cisco and Forinet were still building their products. They were not ready. We were lucky that when we went to Palo Alto they already had done some deployments. They already had a solution ready on the marketplace. They were quickly able to provide us the demo license and walk us through the capabilities and our requirements. The other vendors, when we started a year ago, were not ready.

We didn't look at anything else once we learned about this product and did a PoC. And once we evaluated Prisma, we discussed it internally with our team and made the decision to book it. 

We also looked at Aqua Security and Rapid7 DivvyCloud. Capabilities-wise, these commercial solutions have similar offerings. The two primary differentiators with Palo Alto were:

1. It was by far the most mature solution. They had acquired that maturity through getting the most baked startups, then rebranding and rolling them under the Prisma banner. So, they were the most mature platform at the time. 
2. There was an element of wanting to have that single pane of glass management. They had a SaaS solution that we felt would scale to our large cloud environment. 

Before the implementation of Prisma Cloud, there were only two solutions in the market. The other one was Dome9. We did an evaluation and we chose this one, and they were both very new. This is a very new concept. It pretty much didn't exist until Prisma Cloud came along.

The Prisma Cloud solution was chosen because of the way it helped integrate with our operations people, and our operations people were very happy with it. That was one of the main concerns.

Both solutions are very good at what they do. They approach the same problem from different directions. It was this direction that worked for us. Having said that, certain elements of Prisma Cloud were definitely more attractive to us because they matched up with some of our requirements. I'm very loath to say one product is better than the other, because it does depend on your requirements. It does depend on how you intend to use it and what it is, exactly, that you're looking for.

We evaluated other solutions' costs and features.

I am not sure if any other solution was evaluated, but I am pretty sure that PoC was not done for any other product. 

We did evaluate multiple tools. We knew what we needed the tools to do and we were comparing them all together. We realized that Prisma did a better job and decided to go with them. 

As this is my first solution, I didn't choose any other product other than Prisma Cloud.

We tried a few other options but once we looked at Prisma Cloud we decided it was a better option.

The advantage of Prisma Cloud was its support for all the cloud providers and its automation. The ease of automation was one of our selection criteria. Cost was another consideration. While Prisma Cloud is not cheap, it's in the medium range. But if an organization is already using Palo Alto, they can negotiate a good price.

We did look at a couple other vendors who do similar cloud workload protections. Based on the relationships that we have with Palo Alto, we knew that Palo Alto was kind of the leader in this space. We had hands-on experience with the tool and Palo Alto was also a customer of ours. So, we had some strong relationships and Palo Alto was the leader. 

We did some demos with different tools that were not as comprehensive. We had some tools that we looked at which just focused more on the container side and some that focused more on the cloud API layer. Since Prisma Cloud has unified some of these different pieces into one platform, we ultimately decided that Prisma Cloud was going to be the best solution for us.

We had looked at a number of other tools. I can't tell you off the top of my head what we had looked at, but Prisma Cloud was the tool that we had always decided that we wanted to have. This was the one that we felt would give us the best coverage and the best solution, and I feel that we were correct on that.

The big pro with Prisma Cloud was that we felt it gave us better visibility into the environment and into the connections between entities in the cloud. That visualization piece is fantastic in this tool. We felt like that wasn't really there in some of the other tools. 

Some of the other tools had a little bit better or broader policy base, when we were initially looking at them. I have a feeling that at this point, with the rate that Palo Alto is releasing new policies and putting them into production, that it is probably at parity now. But there was a feeling, at the time, among some of the other members of the team that Palo Alto came up short and didn't have as many policies as some of the other tools that we were looking at.

There are many competitors, such as FortGate, but Palo Alto is better. FortiGate has some advantages in terms of throughput. You can get better throughput if you enable all the engines in parallel. However, I've heard about Fortinet devices being compromised, but I've never heard of that happening with Palo Alto. 

I compared the solution to other security products like Fortinet, Lacework, and Security Command Center.

I've seen some other solutions with CSPM and CWP capabilities, but they do not have the same coverage of multi-cloud or hybrid environments. That's an area where Prisma stands out from its competitors. 

We evaluated Check Point due to the relationship we have with them. Yet, they did not completely support Alibaba. Alibaba was only compatible with Check Point and Prisma. However, Check Point was at a very early stage and not quite as developed. 

We evaluated multiple solutions. They have a well-known product line in the industry, and we stopped and talked with them and picked them because of their capabilities and competencies.

In terms of providing a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities, I'm not expert enough to say that it supplies everything, but it's well-known. There are a number of different features and capabilities in their suite.

At the time we looked at our incumbent vendors and others that were container-specific. We were trying to avoid a new vendor relationship, if possible. We looked at Rapid7 and Tenable. Both were starting to get into the container space at the time. They weren't there yet. We did our evaluation and they were more along the lines of a future thought process than an implementable solution.

We looked at Twistlock, which was a start-up at the time, and Aqua because they were in the space, and we looked at a couple of cloud solutions, but they were in cloud and working their way to container. We did the same exercise with Evident.io and RedLock, before they were purchased by Palo Alto. They were the only vendors that covered our requirements. In the case of Twistlock, their contributions in the NIST 800-190 standards, around container security, helped influence our decision a little bit, as did the completeness of their vision and implementation, versus their competitors.

We evaluated Wiz.

We evaluated multiple products after I came into this organization. We evaluated various CSPM and container security products, such as Aqua Security and Rapid7.

Nowadays, every vendor has come up with a cloud posture management tool. So, we carried out a couple of PoCs in specific customer accounts that had an almost similar type of infrastructure, and based on the outcome, we found Prisma Cloud to be better in terms of identification of miscontrols and security. The cost also played a major role. As compared to other products, it was reasonable. So, the feature set for fulfilling customer requirements and the cost were the two factors that played a major part.

The third factor was the flexibility to work with the vendor. In terms of partnership and support, we felt that being a Palo Alto product, Prisma Cloud would be better. Palo Alto has better service over here, and their channel partners are quite flexible to work with on initial customer demonstration and other things. We felt much more comfortable with Prisma Cloud in all these three aspects.

We also evaluated Aqua Security.

Prior to Prisma cloud, I was looking at Dome9 and Evident.io. Around late 2018 to early 2019, Palo Alto acquired Evident.io and made it part of their Prisma suite of security tools.

At the time, the two that were favorable were Evident.io and Dome9, side-by-side, especially when running multiple AWS accounts in parallel. At the time, it was Dome9 that came out as more cost-effective. But I actually preferred Evident.io. It just happened to be that we were evaluating the Prisma suite and then discovered that Palo Alto had acquired Evident.io. For me that was really useful. As an organization, if we were already exploring the capabilities of Palo Alto and had a commercial presence with them, to then be able to use Prisma Cloud as part of that offering was really good for me as a security specialist in cloud. Prior to that, if as an organization you didn't have a third-party cloud security posture management system for AWS, you were heavily dependent on Trusted Advisor.

We evaluated the Dome9 solution in addition to this one. RedLock was selected based on Rocus' recommendation.

I looked at Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security. Both it and Palo Alto Prisma Cloud are good for container-level security and scanning. But the financial part of it and budgeting play an important role.

With Prisma, it's not just one feature. It has also provided me with solutions for a couple more of my requirements. That was not the case with Trend Micro. In addition, Prisma Cloud was easy for me to figure out. The only con I see in Prisma Cloud is that because of its cost, I have to use multiple tools.

Before choosing Prisma Cloud, we did a few POCs for products like DivvyCloud, Dome9, and Cisive. All these products pretty much do the same thing with a few differentiating factors, but not enough to really stand out.

As of now, we are going to continue with this product. But we are also exploring. New tools are coming into the market so we have to keep up with all the tools and technologies. We are exploring what other kinds of features are available in the market.

We did not use any specific or dedicated cloud security product before evaluating the options we chose to review. Currently, we do not have any specific product that we purchased specifically for cloud security. Recently we came across Palo Alto Prisma Cloud Security and Check Point Cloud Guard Dome9 products and we chose to evaluate both and engage in POCs.  

We wanted to find some solution where we could see all our cloud accounts and manage them in one single pane of glass. When we used the native solutions that were in place through our cloud providers, we had to manage several different clouds by going to each individually. These dedicated products have everything for cloud security management in one place and we can monitor all our cloud activity from there. There is also the benefit that the functionality of dedicated products is more robust.  

Currently, we have stopped using RedLock. We are focusing on exploring Dome9 by Check Point. We have found it very easy to use and the interface is quite user-friendly.  

Before choosing Prisma Cloud, we evaluated SolarWinds as an option. We chose Prisma Cloud because SolarWinds wasn't an enterprise-level software.

My colleague had reviewed other solutions like Aqua and Cloudvisory. One of the reasons for selecting Prisma was that we have planned a multi-cloud approach, and based on our analysis, we felt that Prisma will be better suited for our feature requirements. The other reason was that we already have quite a few Palo Alto products in our environment, so we just thought that it will be easier for us to do integrations with Prisma. So, these were the two key reasons for that decision.

Currently, there are not many options to choose from across different products. So, from that perspective, Prisma is pretty decent. It works how CSPMs are supposed to work. They have to read up the config, and then throw you an alert if they find any misconfiguration. So, from that perspective, I didn't find it to be that different from other CSPMs. The integration pieces and other things are pretty simple in Prisma Cloud, which is something that we can take into account when comparing it with others.

When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, Prisma Cloud is fairly okay. Compared to other tools out there, I don't think it is an extremely good product, but it's a reasonably okay product to work with. I've used Wiz in the past, and Wiz does a better job on full native-cloud security.

For example, there is the auto-remediation feature in Wiz, which Prisma Cloud eventually caught up to. Wiz also has agentless scanning that Prisma Cloud is, again, catching up to. There is also Terraform code scanning for CI/CD pipelines that Wiz came up with, ISC code scanning, et cetera. Those are some of the excellent features of Wiz.

Wiz also offers granular compliance frameworks in the sense that you could write your own compliance queries and make them part of a framework. Prisma Cloud's RQL is not that flexible. We are still running into some issues in some corner cases where there are no RQL queries available.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are very basic. Prisma Cloud is primarily a CSPM, not a CWPP. Even Wiz does not offer that many automation capabilities; they were coming out just at the end of the last year. But compared to other products that I have worked with, which are purely CWPP, Prisma Cloud would not even come close.

I would rate Prisma Cloud at about six out of 10 for helping to take a preventative approach to cloud security. It gets the job done. Our company has invested money in it, so we can't move away from it for another two or three years. But we are already piloting Wiz to see if we like it. Once the contract with Prisma Cloud is up, we will probably jump to Wiz. That's the idea within the company.

If I were to rate Prisma Cloud from one to 10, I would maybe rate it at six, while Wiz would be a nine.

I've never evaluated any other services.