Scheduling upgrades during a planned maintenance window is a fundamental IT best practice for managing critical infrastructure like Prisma Access. This approach minimizes the impact on business operations and user productivity by performing the update during periods of low traffic, typically overnight or on weekends. It allows for a controlled environment to monitor the upgrade, validate functionality post-update, and execute a rollback plan if any unforeseen issues arise, thereby ensuring service continuity and stability.

A. Upgrade all locations at the same time without verifying impact: This is a high-risk strategy that can lead to a global outage if the upgrade fails, offering no opportunity for phased rollout or issue containment.

B. Perform the upgrade on production workloads without any testing: Upgrading a live production environment without prior testing in a non-production or pilot setup is reckless and can cause significant, unexpected service disruptions.

D. Disable all security policies before upgrading Prisma Access: Disabling security policies would expose the entire network to threats during the upgrade process, defeating the purpose of the security platform.

1. Palo Alto Networks - Prisma Access Administrator's Guide: In the section on "Prisma Access Upgrades," the documentation explicitly states, "Palo Alto Networks schedules the upgrades during a maintenance window that you specify when you onboard." This confirms that using a maintenance window is the standard, vendor-sanctioned procedure to minimize service disruption. (Reference: Prisma Access Administrator’s Guide, section "Get Started with Prisma Access", subsection "Prisma Access Upgrades").

2. Palo Alto Networks - Prisma Access Release Information: The release notes for Prisma Access updates consistently detail the upgrade process, which is managed by Palo Alto Networks within customer-defined maintenance windows. This process is designed to be non-disruptive. For example, the documentation notes, "Palo Alto Networks manages the deployment of the updates and performs the updates during your scheduled maintenance window." (Reference: Prisma Access Release Information, section "Upgrading and Downgrading Prisma Access").