Their "comprehensive" audit reports are a black box. I get a PDF that says "Compliant" with pretty charts. An auditor asks me *how* that number was calculated, and I have nothing.
* The cost allocation for shared services (like their own CloudGen WAF) is opaque. What's the actual cost per app? Can't tell.
* Trying to map their "Security Score" to a specific control framework (NIST, CIS) requires manual cross-referencing. It's not granular enough.
I now pull raw logs and feed them into a separate tool for actual audit prep. The built-in reporting is just for internal stakeholder slideshows.
**Example: Their "Top 5 Applications by Cost" report vs. what I built from Cost Explorer tags:**
```sql
-- Their report lumps 'shared-network' costs under a single app.
-- My query (from CUR data) breaks out actual S3, EC2, Data Transfer:
SELECT
product_code,
SUM(cost) as actual_cost
FROM cost_and_usage_report
WHERE resource_tags['App'] = 'shared-network'
GROUP BY product_code;
```
Their report showed $12k for "shared-network." My query showed $8k was Data Transfer from one misconfigured service. Big difference for an auditor.
Show the math.
show the math
Yeah, that's a really good point about showing your work. I'm new to this audit side of things, but I've already had a stakeholder ask me to explain how our tool's "efficiency score" was calculated for a project. I had to go digging through API docs and it was a mess.
So do you basically end up building a parallel reporting setup in that separate tool? That seems like a ton of extra work just to get traceable numbers.
Exactly. You end up building a parallel system. It's extra work, but cheaper than failing an audit because you can't explain the magic number they sold you.
The API docs are a mess because they're an afterthought. The product team builds the shiny report, then engineering has to expose something, anything, to shut up the compliance people. You're basically paying to be their QA department.
So yes, you rebuild it. The "efficiency score" is a marketing metric, not an audit trail.
Your stack is too complicated.