Hi everyone! I'm new to cloud security and my team is looking at options.
We're a small team of 5 engineers. Our entire stack is serverless, built on AWS Lambda functions (with API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB). We don't have any VPCs or traditional servers to manage.
I've been reading about Prisma Cloud, but it seems like a huge platform. Is it overkill for a pure serverless setup like ours? We mainly need to:
- Check our Lambda configs for security issues (like over-permissive IAM roles).
- Scan our infrastructure-as-code (we use Terraform) for misconfigurations before deployment.
- Get alerts on runtime threats or suspicious activity.
Is Prisma Cloud a good fit here, or would a simpler, AWS-native tool be better? I'd love to hear from other small teams using it. Thanks for any guidance! 😊
I'm a senior backend engineer at a 40-person fintech, where I manage our AWS cloud posture; we've been fully serverless on Lambda for about three years and I've directly evaluated and deployed both AWS-native and third-party security tooling in production.
**Core Comparison: Prisma Cloud vs. AWS Native (Security Hub + Config + Lambda-specific checks)**
1. **Fit and Overhead:** Prisma Cloud is an enterprise platform. Its alerting, dashboards, and compliance workflows are built for orgs with dedicated security teams. For your 5-engineer team, you'll spend notable time tuning its 500+ possible alerts down to the 15 that matter for serverless. AWS Security Hub with AWS Foundational Security Best Practices is far more scoped to general AWS usage, but you'll need to add Lambda-specific depth.
2. **Real Pricing:** Prisma Cloud starts at roughly $25-30 per function/month for CSPM/CWPP, with a minimum annual commitment that was around $25k when we got a quote. For five engineers managing maybe 30-50 Lambda functions, that's steep for just config scanning. AWS Security Hub costs about $0.30 per config check per resource per month, plus maybe $100/month for Lambda invocation analysis if you enable all standards; for a small footprint, your monthly bill will likely be under $150.
3. **Deployment/Integration Effort:** Integrating Prisma Cloud requires installing its CloudFormation stack or Terraform provider, then connecting your AWS account via a read-only IAM role. It auto-discovers resources in about an hour. AWS Security Hub is a one-click enable in your account, but to get the Terraform scanning you want, you must integrate it with your CI/CD pipeline separately, using something like `tfsec` or `checkov` on the PR, as Security Hub itself doesn't scan Terraform code pre-deployment.
4. **Clear Win and Limitation:** Prisma Cloud's win is its unified view across code, infrastructure, and runtime, with built-in Terraform scanning and Lambda-specific risk policies like "function with IAM role that allows *:*." Its limitation for you is that 70% of its features (container scanning, VM vulnerability management, cloud network topology) are irrelevant to a pure serverless stack. AWS-native tools win on cost and simplicity but lose on consolidated alerting; you'll be checking Security Hub for IAM findings, CloudTrail Insights for runtime threats, and separate Terraform scan outputs, with no single dashboard.
Given your pure serverless stack and small team, I'd recommend starting with AWS Security Hub and embedding `checkov` in your Terraform CI/CD pipeline. This addresses your core needs without platform overhead. If you find you're spending more than 4-5 hours a week triaging disjointed alerts from three different places, then evaluate Prisma Cloud for its consolidation benefit.
SQL is not dead.