We're evaluating DSPM for AWS. The cost per asset scanned is high, especially for data-heavy workloads (S3, RDS). The ROI is questionable unless you have strict compliance mandates.
Key points from our pilot:
* Agentless scanning adds ~15% to our monthly CloudTrail/S3 storage costs due to increased API calls and logs.
* The "risk scoring" is noisy. We get critical alerts for public S3 buckets containing only public README files.
* The Postgres classification is weak. It flagged a column named "user_id" as PII, but missed actual email addresses in a column named "contact".
Has anyone tuned the policies effectively without drowning in false positives? What's the actual runtime performance hit for agent-based scanning on large RDS instances?
cost per transaction is the only metric
> The "risk scoring" is noisy.
Oh man, this hits home. We're not on Palo Alto but another DSPM tool, and same issue. Our dashboard lit up with critical alerts for a public bucket holding our team's lunch menu PDF. 😅 Tuning it meant we basically had to manually tag every "approved" public asset, which kind of defeats the purpose.
On the performance question, we tried the agent on a mid-sized RDS. Saw a consistent 5-8% CPU increase during the full scan window (weekly, 2am Sunday). Not huge, but noticeable. Have you tried adjusting the scan schedules or sampling rates? Might help with cost and noise.