In today’s predominantly digital age, the reliance of businesses on cloud-native applications and environments for innovation and efficiency has increased. As the adoption of the cloud increases, the protection of these cloud platforms increasingly becomes a business necessity.

Fortunately, businesses can maximize the potential of their digital ecosystems by securely integrating with the cloud. Cloud platforms offer rapid information transfer and sharing, increase collaboration, and make workplace processes more effective.

Prisma Cloud delivers complete security for cloud-native apps as well as infrastructure by offering robust protection, continuous monitoring, and automated threat detection & response among other benefits. The platform integrates smoothly with DevOps methods and can scale appropriately with your business operations, all the while increasing visibility and control over the company’s environment on the cloud.

In this post, we dive into the various cybersecurity use cases of Prisma Cloud, illustrating how effectively integrating this product can enhance your company’s cloud security and intercommunication with additional platforms you may be using.

Overview

Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks is a comprehensive security platform for cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. A few of its key features include: 

• Prisma Cloud Console: Central management interface with dashboards, policy management, and incident response. 
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Continuous monitoring and enforcement of security best practices and compliance standards. 
• Cloud Workload Protection (CWP): Secures cloud workloads through runtime protection, vulnerability management, and integrity monitoring. 
• Cloud Security Analytics: Advanced analytics and machine learning for detecting and responding to threats. 
• Data Protection: Comprehensive data security such as discovery, classification, risk analysis, compliance, and access governance.
• Malware Detection: Detects malware in Linux container images using inputs from Intelligence Stream, Wildfire service, and other custom feeds. (Note: It does not support Windows container images).

In sum, Prisma Cloud helps ensure visibility, compliance, and security throughout the application lifecycle.

Cybersecurity Use Cases for Prisma Cloud

1. Safeguarding Cloud Infrastructure

Prisma Cloud plays a key role in protecting cloud infrastructure by ensuring that a secure configuration of cloud resources is in place and continuously observed as per industry standards. It uses predefined and customizable configuration policies that are used to scan against CIS benchmarks and other similar standards, thus ensuring a strong security posture. Here is how:

• Continuous monitoring and sending alerts for immediate identification of any threats to facilitate real-time visibility into the cloud.  
• Enhancing IAM security by monitoring configurations against privilege escalations and unauthorized access. 
• Guarding sensitive information with data classification techniques and encryption methods employed by Prisma Cloud to prevent data leakage. 

Prisma Cloud can be described as an all-in-one security solution for cloud infrastructure since; among other things, it employs machine learning models along with anomaly detection systems to spot unusual activities revealing potential breaches.

2. Guarding Cloud-native Applications

Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive protection of applications designed with serverless functions and microservices, enhancing their security throughout the lifecycle so that organizations can concentrate on innovation without losing out on safety.

• Prisma Cloud provides container security that scans for vulnerabilities, malware, and compliance issues in container images before they are deployed and also keeps an eye on running containers for runtime threats and anomalies. 
• For serverless functions, it inspects for vulnerabilities, enforces security policies, and offers runtime protection to detect and prevent attacks. 
• Ensures secure communication between services by monitoring traffic and enforcing security policies for microservices. 
• Prisma Cloud uses anomaly detection for runtime protection to detect threats like privilege escalation, file system changes, or suspicious network activities.  
• It integrates with CI/CD tools to embed security checks into the development process ensuring secure code delivery through DevSecOps practices.

3. Compliance Management

Regulatory compliance can be made easier by the use of Prisma Cloud as it provides a medium to companies through which they can monitor and take actions on adherence to various regulations, thus avoiding non-compliance penalties. 

• Since Prisma Cloud monitors cloud resources and keeps them in line with the standards, integrating it with your platform will ensure that there is continuous enforcement of compliance.
• Compliance reports generated by Prisma Cloud are comprehensive, highlighting any areas of non-compliance and the next possible steps for improvement. 
• Prisma Cloud maintains an extensive audit trail on all compliance-related activities, ensuring accountability and facilitating audits. 
• Prisma Cloud supports policy management by enabling enterprises to create custom-made compliance policies based on their requirements.

4. Incident Response

The capacity to identify, look into, and promptly respond to cloud environment security incidents is one of Prisma Cloud’s strengths and the platform manages to do so by:

• Providing actionable insights and automated response capabilities, Prisma Cloud assists in addressing these emerging threats at their early stages before significant damage occurs. 
• Using machine learning and threat intelligence for automated incident detection ensures that security incidents are quickly categorized. 
• Offering extensive tools for investigating incidents such as event correlation and root cause analysis that helps evaluate the extent and impact of breaches. 

Overall, this is an effective approach to responding quickly to cyber-attacks because it enables quarantine, remediation, or alerting to be taken immediately through response automation features.

Incident response is also supported by pre-defined playbooks that help standardize the response process so as to expedite it while real-time alerts notify relevant personnel on time for immediate action.

5. CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) Security

When it comes to deploying code in the CI/CD pipeline, security is important so that no vulnerabilities are deployed to a production environment. Prisma Cloud seamlessly incorporates security scans into the CI/CD process, ensuring that security gaps can be detected and fixed before going live. 

• Code repositories, container images and infrastructure as code (IaC) templates inside CI/CD pipelines undergo security scanning in Prisma Cloud. It identifies and prioritizes code and dependency vulnerabilities, giving developers remediation guidance and allowing them to integrate it into any CI process. 
• The platform enforces compliance by assessing code and infrastructure against regulatory requirements prior to deployment, preventing non-compliant resources from entering production. 
• Prisma Cloud enables developers to address security issues before they propagate by embedding security early in the development lifecycle. 
• Prisma Cloud perfectly integrates with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab, and CircleCI to enforce security policies across the development process.

Conclusion

Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud offers solid protection capabilities for cloud and cloud-native applications. Its diverse range of functions, strong integration capabilities, and automated features make it a top choice for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture through integration with this platform.

When companies implement Prisma Cloud, they can ensure that their cloud setup is secure, meets requirements, and is well prepared to handle threats.

Prisma Cloud can be integrated with BAS, XDRs, SIEMs, SOARs, and many other platforms, depending on your company’s needs. Metron has expertise in building such integrations with Prisma Cloud and many more.

If you are considering any custom cybersecurity solution that focuses on the resources and needs of your organization, please send a note to connect@metronlabs.com.