We recently announced the largest release for Prisma Cloud to date, creating the industry's only comprehensive Cloud Native Security Platform (CNSP).
But what does it mean to say Prisma Cloud 2.0 is the industry’s only comprehensive CNSP? Why is it essential for a CISO, cybersecurity leader, cloud security engineer or DevOps engineer?
Why Does a Comprehensive CNSP Matter?
Our claim has three aspects: Prisma Cloud is comprehensive, it is cloud native and it is an integrated platform. Let me explain what we mean by each of these terms, and how each one contributes to creating better outcomes for our customers.
Comprehensive
By comprehensive, we mean that Prisma Cloud is designed and optimized for a wide set of security scenarios. It offers four pillars of functionality, covering areas like visibility and security compliance, application security, network security and permissions/identity security, across nine integrated functionality modules. All of this comes with full lifecycle protection, from scanning code in development to managing runtime risk, and providing ex post facto forensics for incident response. No other cloud security vendor solution offers such comprehensive capabilities as a single product within a single pane of glass.
Prisma Cloud has cloud hosting locations around the world, including the US, Canada, Continental Europe, Singapore, Australia and China. In the US, Prisma Cloud also supports AWS GovCloud and Azure Government. This translates into stronger, broader and more flexible coverage of your cloud environments, no matter where or how you operate or plan to grow.
Cloud Native
Prisma Cloud is purpose-built to help customers secure their cloud native applications and environments. This philosophy applies whether through new development leveraging modern, cloud-native architectures or securing "lift-and-shift" migrations while maintaining consistency across all cloud environments.
The platform is designed for, built in and operates as a cloud service – the platform uses microservices running on containers, and our product teams deploy code continuously to our customers. In fact, we release new builds monthly. We can support cloud native because we understand cloud native.
Integrated Platform
Finally, a key reason Prisma Cloud is so effective is because the entire scope of functionality exists in one pane of glass. Users don't have to jump from one browser window to another to get a full understanding of security posture or reconcile data and logs from a multitude of sources.
Users benefit from our ability to correlate data across multiple threat vectors and multiple resources. For instance, if a customer has an Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) bucket open to the public, Prisma Cloud helps detect it as a potential misconfiguration and can help assess the relative severity of the exposure based on an understanding of the sensitivity of the data being stored in that S3 bucket. Likewise, if an organization has multiple public-facing web applications and APIs, Prisma Cloud can help automatically identify new or existing resources, and provide compliance information, runtime status and protection details.
Even more, there is a single commercial SKU, meaning customers have access to the full product without having to buy it piece-by-piece. At the same time, our model allows customers to adopt Prisma Cloud at their own pace, so they don’t have to make a decision to go all-in at once. This is especially appealing in the current pandemic as most security teams don’t have the bandwidth to implement a single, big-bang redesign of their security processes.
What Does Prisma Cloud Mean For Customers?
The cumulative effect of this comprehensive CNSP is that customers get future-proof solutions, using fewer tools and fewer vendors – simplifying cloud security. When organizations use disparate, fragmented security tools, it makes their cloud environment less secure – complexity breeds gaps, and gaps breed insecurity.
I have personally spoken with hundreds of cloud security teams over the last year. I find most organizations fall into one of three categories. Some have started on a path to building an entire platform by themselves, which they are realizing is very costly and hard to keep current. Some are building the "glue" so they can stitch different best-of-breed tools together. Others are still stuck with silos of multiple, independent tools that need to be managed individually. Customers in each of these three categories want a path to a simpler, more efficient and more secure state – and most have a desire to move to a unified platform.
Not surprisingly, research from the State of Cloud Native Security report published earlier this year found that a majority of cloud customers (57%) use more than five cloud security tools to manage their cloud environments. However, 51% of the highest performing organizations think a single, comprehensive cloud native security solution would improve their security posture. The consolidated approach is critical for the cloud since more than 90% of businesses use multiple cloud providers. They need a uniform approach to managing security across all their public and private environments.
Begin Your Journey With Prisma Cloud
Let me share some recent examples of customers who have embarked on the journey to a comprehensive cloud security platform across their cloud environments.
- A large fintech company switched to Prisma Cloud after a year of shaping their security processes around multiple point-solution vendors. The company saw the value of a single pane of glass covering cloud visibility, helping with compliance and enforcing container security.
- A global healthcare company adopted Prisma Cloud to preempt the creation of multiple tools to help manage cloud compliance and container security.
- A large telecom operator decided to get rid of the headache of managing four different solutions. The telco decided to adopt Prisma Cloud to help with cloud compliance, container security, micro-segmentation and identity management, even though this required migrating well over 2,000 policies from their point solutions to Prisma Cloud.
- One of the largest SaaS companies rolled out Prisma Cloud as their company-wide standard across all their different product lines and acquisitions, so they can have a unified view across product groups and subsidiaries.
You can start your journey with Prisma Cloud regardless of which cloud security tools you have adopted. Our solution easily integrates or can coexist with your current environment, until such time as you are ready to consolidate different components, in the sequence and at the pace you want. We will guide your journey by sharing the best practices gleaned from similar journeys of more than 1,800 customers working through our customer success teams.
To learn more about the Prisma Cloud 2.0 release, watch the on-demand recording of our fireside chat on LinkedIn Live. In the chat, Prisma Cloud product leadership and other industry experts discuss the latest cloud trends and offer insights on how to protect cloud native applications.