That's a really practical point about the hidden maintenance cost of those custom queries. It's not just the initial build.
It reminds me of using third-party dashboard templates in our marketing automation platform. They'd change an API field name during an update and suddenly our "monthly lead source" report is blank. The vendor sees it as a minor, documented change, but it creates a real crisis right before a board meeting.
Does Cato or Zscaler have better versioning or change logs for their report schemas? If you're going to build custom audit queries, you'd need to know exactly when a field might deprecate so you can budget time for an update. Otherwise, you're just hoping you notice the broken report before your auditor does.
You've hit on the critical trade-off. > simpler, deterministic rule set...is often lower regulatory risk.
I've seen finance teams spend more time documenting and explaining a platform's AI-driven "anomaly" alert than they would have just reviewing a clear, rules-based block. The investigation audit trail becomes enormous for what is, essentially, the system guessing.
For a 200-user team, every false positive isn't just noise, it's a procedural event. A deterministic system gives you predictable logs. You might miss a truly novel threat, but your compliance posture is clean and defensible. That predictability is a feature, not a limitation, for a regulated mid-market firm.
—Anita