Palo Alto Networks strengthened its cloud-native security offerings with the addition of Out-of-Band Web Application and API Security (Out-of-Band WAAS) to Prisma Cloud. The cybersecurity solutions firm aims to help organizations secure web applications with maximum flexibility.

Digital acceleration over the past two years increased the use of the cloud so companies can ensure business continuity amid restrictions due to the pandemic.

According to Palo Alto Networks, primary industry approach to securing web applications has been to deploy inline web application firewalls (WAFs). Some organizations are reluctant to introduce WAFs or API security solutions inline due to performance and scalability concerns. Prisma Cloud promises to provide organizations with deep web and API security both inline and out of band, allowing them to choose how to protect their applications in the cloud.

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“Companies no longer have to decide between application security and performance. By adding Out-of-Band WAAS to Prisma Cloud, we are empowering customers with flexible security options that fit their evolving application needs,” Ankur Shah, senior vice president, Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, said in a media advisory. “As more organizations move workloads to the cloud, the capabilities that make up Prisma Cloud help provide the most complete protection, reducing complexity and increasing visibility across infrastructure, workloads, identities, and applications.”

Threat detection

In addition to Out-of-Band WAAS, Prisma Cloud is getting new threat detection, alert prioritization, and permissions management capabilities to help provide organizations with deeper, unified visibility across their entire cloud application portfolio:

Multicloud Graph View for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) helps organizations discover over-privileged accounts and understand access risk across multi-cloud environments. Prisma Cloud now provides a graph view of the net effective permissions across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Multicloud Agentless Cloud Workload Protection helps extend visibility into cloud workloads and application risks across Azure and Google Cloud, in addition to AWS, to complement existing agent-based protection.

With DNS-Based Threat Detection, organizations can detect surface malicious activity and anomalous behavior in cloud environments. Prisma Cloud Threat Detection now leverages machine learning (ML) and advanced threat intelligence to identify bad actors hiding in DNS traffic.

The MITRE ATT&CK Alert Prioritization enables security teams to prioritize risks and incidents based on the industry’s most widely adopted framework.