Creating and Cloning CSP Accounts
Environment
Empowering Self-Service for Greater Agility
Instructions: Palo Alto Networks is introducing powerful new self-service features within the Customer Support Portal (CSP). These enhancements are designed to provide you with greater control and operational agility, specifically targeting the Adoption stage of your customer journey. By empowering you to manage your CSP account structure to precisely fit your organization's unique operating model, we are enhancing your ability to effectively utilize our products long after the initial purchase.
The strategic goal of this initiative is to empower you to perform common account management tasks directly and efficiently. This shift to self-service enables you to manage your own CSP structure and significantly reduces administrative overhead.
Overview
The self-service account creation and cloning functionality is a cornerstone of the "Empowered Self-Service" initiative delivered in this update. This feature directly addresses a significant customer pain point: the lack of direct control over account governance.
What's New?
Customers with the Superuser role can now create new CSP accounts directly from the portal. This eliminates the previous dependency on Palo Alto Networks support for account creation.
Key Customer Benefits
This new functionality delivers several significant advantages:
- Enhanced Operational Agility: Quickly create new accounts to align with evolving support models.
- Ease of Use: An optional cloning feature simplifies the setup of new accounts by carrying over members.
- Reduced Administrative Burden: Removes the need to open a support case and wait for a response.
Who Can Use This Feature?
This capability is exclusively available to users with the Superuser role within the Customer Support Portal.
Creating and Cloning a CSP Account
Superusers can access the new account creation tools through the main account management interface. To create a new account, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Account Management: Log into the Customer Support Portal and select the Account Management section.
- Access Account Actions: Within Account Management, you will find a new tab labeled Account Actions. Click this tab to access the new self-service tools.
- Initiate Account Creation:
Provide a name for the new account & Select the option to create a new CSP account from within this tab. This will create a new CSP account mapped to the same purchasing entity (Salesforce account used for Quoting). The superuser creating the account will be added to the new account as Superuser also. - Clone Existing Members (Optional):
During creation, you will be presented with an option to "clone all members" from your current account into the new one. Selecting this checkbox provides a convenient way to ensure all members of the current account will be copied over to the new account, with exact roles & privileges. - Confirm Creation:
Upon completion, a confirmation notification will appear containing a direct hyperlink to the newly created account.
Cloning Limitations: To ensure correct expectations and smooth operations, it is crucial to understand the scope of the account cloning functionality. The process is designed for a specific purpose—replicating user membership—and does not migrate all account data.
Key Limitation: Cloning Creates a Shell Account It is essential to understand that cloning an account only carries over the members from the source account. The new account is a "shell" and will not contain any products, entitlements, or support cases from the source account.
The practical implication of this is that a newly cloned account is effectively an empty container populated with users. Any products or entitlements must be moved into the new account separately. This is accomplished using the self-service entitlement transfer functionality, which is designed to work in concert with account creation. Together, these self-service features provide a comprehensive toolkit for managing your CSP environment, which is particularly powerful for governing your SaaS entitlements with unprecedented control and flexibility.