Okay, so we've been running Prisma Access for a full year now across about 300 users, and I have *thoughts*. Everyone talks about the shiny new setup phase, but what's it like to actually live with? Here’s my honest take from the trenches.
The good stuff is genuinely good. The security posture feels rock-solid, and having that consistent policy enforcement for remote users everywhere is a huge relief. The integration with our on-prem Panorama meant we didn't have to learn a whole new policy language, which was a major win for my team's sanity 😅. And honestly, the user experience for our people scattered around is smooth—no more clunky VPN client complaints.
But (you knew there was a 'but' coming!), the operational side has some... quirks. The service outages, while rare, are a black box. You just see the dashboard alerts and have to wait. No root cause analysis like you'd get with your own gear. And the billing/predicting costs? It feels a bit like a mystery box each month unless you're obsessively monitoring data usage per region. What about the mobile user add-on pricing—anyone else find that hard to forecast?
My biggest question for others is about the API and automation. We’re trying to automate some of the service ticket stuff (like onboarding new remote locations), and the documentation feels a bit... sparse? Has anyone built any cool integrations or scripts for day-to-day management they’d share? I’d love to compare notes on that.
Also, the whole "Autonomous Digital Experience Management" (ADEM) module—we trialed it but the value wasn't super clear for the cost. Did anyone else dive deeper and find a killer use case we missed? Maybe for specific SaaS app performance?
Words matter