Palo Alto Networks Inc. today introduced a new version of its Prisma Cloud cybersecurity platform that incorporates the technologies the company gained through its high-profile series of recent startup acquisitions. 

Prisma Cloud is, as the name indicates, designed to protect companies’ hybrid and multicloud environments. It provides monitoring features for identifying security issues along with breach prevention tools that allow administrators to block threats.

The breach prevention capabilities are partially powered by software Palo Alto Networks bought through its purchase of Twistlock Ltd. and PureSec Ltd. in the middle of the year. Prisma Cloud connects to the development tools used by a company’s engineers to detect vulnerable code before it’s released. The platform can find security flaws in container images, serverless functions written for services such as AWS Lambda and the configuration templates software teams use to set up their infrastructure-as-a-service environments.

Prisma Cloud doubles as a monitoring tool. The platform visualizes security data collected from a company’s cloud  infrastructure in dashboards that let administrators see at a glance if there any systems suffer from vulnerabilities. Another set of dashboards shows compliance violations, like if a repository of customer records isn’t configured in accordance with the European Union’s GDPR privacy regulation.

The monitoring features are the fruit of two startup deals that preceded Palo Alto Networks’ purchase of Twistlock and PureSec this year. The company shelled out $300 million for infrastructure visibility provider Evident.io Inc. in March of 2018, then paid $173 million to buy RedLock Inc., which developed software that helped companies spot suspicious activity on their systems.

“Customers can now use Prisma Cloud as a single pane of glass to secure their entire application lifecycle from build to deploy to run across IaaS, PaaS, network, storage, host, container and serverless,” Palo Alto Networks product management director Patrick Chang and marketing manager Ron Harnik wrote in a blog post.

The next technology the company will bake into Prisma Cloud will be Aporeto Inc.’s microsegmentation software. Palo Alto Networks on Monday entered a $150 million agreement to acquire the startup, which develops tools that enable organizations to isolate their cloud applications from one another to limit the fallout in case one of the workloads is compromised.

Photo: Palo Alto Networks