Enhance Your Cloud Visibility and Operations with Prisma Cloud and Azure

Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with new methods of attack becoming more common as the proliferation of mobile devices, the Internet of Things, cloud infrastructure, distributed workforces, and more add to the attack landscape exponentially. This makes cloud resource visibility critical in helping businesses keep their data safe while remaining one step ahead of cybercriminals.

Derek Rogerson, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Palo Alto Networks, explains how Prisma Cloud, available in the Azure Marketplace, delivers enhanced cloud visibility to provide full lifecycle security for any cloud-native workload or application running on Microsoft Azure:

Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility. That’s why partnering with a third party who specializes in Azure cloud security is an effective strategy. It can offload that shared responsibility to a trusted and proven vendor and provide teams with a “better together” integrated and cloud native solution.

Visibility gaps, for instance, are a fundamental issue every cloud team faces and a top five cloud concern cited by market analyst firm the Enterprise Strategy Group. Lack of cloud visibility creates an elevated risk that could be exploited by cyber attackers just by probing infrastructure from the outside. The axiom “you cannot protect what you cannot see” is appropriate to remember and something for teams to act on when managing their ephemeral and constantly changing cloud resources.

Let’s take a closer look at how Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is partnering with Azure to help address visibility challenges in cloud operations.

Auto-detect Azure VMs with Prisma Cloud

Virtual machines (VMs) that run in public clouds require purpose-built security to streamline protections at scale. However, as an organization’s cloud footprint increases, it becomes progressively harder to track and protect the growing number of VMs. Fortunately, Prisma Cloud addresses visibility gaps in the cloud by automatically detecting unprotected VMs running on Azure. 

Manage Azure resource hierarchy and resource groups with Prisma Cloud

Enhanced visibility on user roles and who can view data makes it easy for teams to manage and understand cloud resources at scale.

Using Prisma Cloud, Azure teams can build a flexible structure of management groups and subscriptions to organize resources into a hierarchy. Teams can onboard all Azure resources or a subset of resources based on how they are grouped under management groups and subscriptions. Once onboarded, any new subscriptions will be auto detected by Prisma Cloud for continuous monitoring and visibility. This protection and monitoring capability is available with Prisma Cloud across all Azure Commercial, Government, and China regions.

Additionally, teams can further perform Azure RBAC (role-based access control) using resource lists for Azure Resource Groups to restrict user permissions to specific roles. Only roles with permission will have access to data in the resource list, and the resource lists are automatically ingested into Compliance and Asset Inventory dashboards for more granular visibility into your Azure resources and security posture, saving cloud teams additional time and worry.

Advanced alerting with Microsoft Azure Sentinel and Prisma Cloud

Gaining the visibility teams need requires timely alerts that can be digested in familiar environments and formats.

Prisma Cloud partners to send alerts to Azure Sentinel, which then integrates seamlessly with all Microsoft security controls and consumes signals and intelligence from third-party security solutions on Azure, on-premises, or on other clouds. This integrated partner support for streamlined and cost-effective security data collection enhances threat visibility on Azure and improves workflows for incident response teams to simplify orchestration efforts.

Better together: Prisma Cloud and Azure

Cloud security often comes down how well solutions can work in unison to elevate strengths. Prisma Cloud focuses on cloud innovation through an integrated approach with Azure that enables enhanced visibility so security operations and DevOps teams can accelerate secure cloud native development across the entire Azure environment. Prisma Cloud together with Azure is purpose-built to seamlessly integrate security visibility into your Azure development lifecycle – across Build, Deploy, and Run – and protect you by scanning for vulnerabilities across any stack, including IaC templates like Terraform and Kubernetes manifests.

By deploying Prisma Cloud together with Azure, organizations can improve security visibility of resources, improve the ability to fix vulnerabilities, and reduce time spent on managing compliance while lowering the likelihood of material data breaches. Overall, Prisma Cloud delivers a 276 percent return on investment (ROI) over three years with $5.81 million in net present value and is the only cloud-native security platform to be recognized as a Leader in the GigaOm Radar for Vulnerability Management Report for 2021.

Palo Alto Networks together with Azure is helping shape a cloud-centric future with continuous cloud security visibility and innovation. Visit the Palo Alto Networks website for more information on how cloud-native Prisma Cloud helps elevate cloud security visibility as a trusted partner for Azure.