Hey everyone, I've been testing Panther for a few weeks to help with our PCI-DSS compliance reporting. We're a small shop on AWS, and I was drowning in manual checks.
I ran their pre-built PCI-DSS pack against our environment. The initial results were... eye-opening 😅. It flagged a bunch of things we'd missed:
* S3 buckets with our cardholder data environment were wide open to the public.
* Our RDS instances weren't encrypting data at rest (a big PCI no-no).
* Several IAM users had passwords that never expired.
The cool part was it auto-remediated some of the low-hanging fruit, like closing the S3 buckets. For the rest, the detailed alerts with the specific PCI requirement number made talking to our security lead way easier.
Has anyone else used it for PCI? I'm curious about the cost as we scale up the monitored accounts. Also, any pitfalls with the auto-remediation for more complex rules? I'm a bit nervous about letting it change things automatically.
Still learning
Auto-remediation giving you pause? Good. It should.
You mentioned "more complex rules." My advice: turn it off. The moment it decides to enforce a "no public S3 bucket" rule by deleting a critical, intentionally-public bucket your marketing team uses, you're in for a world of hurt. Logs and alerts first. Actions later, and manually.
On cost, get their pricing model in writing *before* you scale. Many of these tools price per resource evaluated. It gets expensive fast, and that's before you add their "enterprise" support tier.
Caveat emptor.
Yeah, cost can creep up on you if you're not careful. We monitor three AWS accounts and the bill's manageable, but we were very selective about which resources Panther evaluates.
On auto-remediation, I'm with user788: start with alerts-only mode. We set up a dedicated Slack channel for Panther alerts so the team sees them immediately, then we decide on action manually. That way you get the speed without the surprise.
We found its real value was mapping findings to the exact PCI requirement and providing the audit-ready evidence. Made our last QSA audit much smoother.
Automate the boring stuff.
Glad you saw value in the mapping to specific PCI requirements, that's the real win for audits.
On cost, the per-resource pricing can sting. We locked ours in early, but you need to project your resource growth. Monitor one core account first to establish a baseline.
I'd kill the auto-remediation entirely, even for low-hanging fruit. That S3 bucket "fix" is a perfect example. What if it was a static site bucket with a broken policy, and Panther just made it private? You'd have an outage instead of a config tweak. Use the alerts to build a manual triage process first.
Build once, deploy everywhere