Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) today announced a number of enhancements to Prisma^® Cloud, the industry’s only comprehensive Cloud Native Security Platform. With these enhancements, Prisma Cloud now has the industry’s most accurate web application firewall (WAF) capabilities. When securing cloud native applications, Prisma Cloud ensures scalability, automated protection and integrated protection for defense in depth.

“Customers want as much protection as possible, delivered as simply as possible across the cloud native continuum – securing hosts, containers and Kubernetes, and serverless functions – both at runtime and across the application lifecycle. Many organizations are moving to the cloud and need to protect applications end-to-end, starting from infrastructure and going all the way to the application layer,” said Varun Badhwar, senior vice president for product, Prisma Cloud, at Palo Alto Networks. “Prisma Cloud delivers the best-of-breed and comprehensive solution designed to protect these organizations from third-party attacks.”

Prisma Cloud delivers cloud workload protection capabilities through a number of distinct modules including Host Security, Container Security, and Web Application and API Security (WAAS). The enhancements to these modules include:

• Bot Risk Management: Prisma Cloud Web Application and API Security (WAAS) customers can now manage web bots and decide how to handle access for different bot types. Users have customizable visibility and protection covering known, unknown and user-defined bots.
• Advanced DoS Protection: Prisma Cloud WAAS now includes the ability to defend against application-layer denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by applying rate controls.
• Host Security With Custom Compliance Policies: Prisma Cloud enhances compliance for virtual machines with custom compliance checks for operating systems, orchestrators and runtime configurations.
• Container Security With Enhanced Kubernetes Cluster Awareness and CRI-O Compliance Checks: Prisma Cloud now has deeper Kubernetes^® integration with enhanced Kubernetes cluster awareness. This makes it simpler to gain quick visibility, manage security policies and view runtime audits via Kubernetes cluster filters. For CRI-O, Prisma Cloud maps 25 specific compliance checks to CRI-O across containers, images and host configurations.

“Today’s security teams need to ensure their web applications, especially those running on cloud native architectures like containers and Kubernetes, are protected from threats and attacks,” says Doug Cahill, vice president and group director, Cybersecurity, ESG. “With an integrated approach to web application and API security, Prisma Cloud is addressing that concern head-on.”

Accuracy

WAAS accuracy was measured across six competitors in an internal benchmark analysis of 200,000 legitimate web transactions. Prisma Cloud WAAS produced the lowest false positive rate to deliver the highest accuracy.

Availability

All the aforementioned features are available today in Prisma Cloud Compute Edition, with general availability in Prisma Cloud Enterprise Edition by early February.

More Information

To learn more see our blog or join our Building a Scalable Strategy for Cloud Security virtual summit on Tuesday, January 26.