Palo Alto Networks updated its Prisma Cloud security product to provide more options for customers securing their cloud native deployments.

The product now has the ability for Prisma Cloud Web Application and API Security (WAAS) users to manage web bots. This allows for managing how to handle access for different bot types, including visibility and protection for known, unknown, and user-defined bots.

Prisma Cloud Security also now provides the ability to defend against application-layer denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by applying rate controls.

Keith Mokris, head of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks, noted in a blog post that these updates build on the WAAS updates the vendor launched with its Prisma Cloud 2.0 release last October.

The latest update also includes custom compliance checks for operating systems, orchestrators, and runtime configurations for applications running in virtual machines (VMs). And it has deeper Kubernetes cluster awareness that makes it easier to gain visibility, manage security policies, and view runtime audits via Kubernetes cluster filters. This includes the ability to map 25 compliance checks to the CRI-O container runtime across containers, images, and host configurations.

The updates are immediately part of Prisma Cloud Compute Edition, with general availability in the platform’s Enterprise Edition scheduled for early next month.

The updates improve what is considered a market leading security platform. Gartner ranked Palo Alto alongside Fortinet and Check Point as market leaders in its most recent Magic Quadrant for network firewall products.

The analyst firm heaped praise on Palo Alto for the breadth of its product offering, which spans hardware, virtual appliances, and cloud-based firewalls — the granularity of its application-based policy enforcement, and the company’s strong focus on cloud security. Gartner also called out the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix, which Palo Alto bought last year for $420 million.

“Palo Alto Networks’ firewall is a good shortlist candidate for clients looking for a firewall with premium subscriptions at a premium price,” the report’s authors wrote.

However, premium pricing proved to be a sticking point for many Gartner clients that expressed concerns with the company’s high subscription renewal costs. Gartner also called out the lack of a cloud-based management console and possible issues with the company’s Prisma Access secure access service edge (SASE) product.

“Clients have reported scalability issues with large Prisma Access deployments beyond 60,000 users,” the authors wrote.