We used GCP Security Command Center (SCC) for years. Moved to Prisma Cloud for "multi-cloud visibility." Big mistake for GCP workload context.
Prisma treats everything as generic cloud resources. Loses all the GCP-specific metadata and relationships SCC surfaces natively. Finding a misconfigured Cloud SQL instance? In SCC, you see the full resource hierarchy, VPC flow logs, and IAM bindings in one place. In Prisma, it's just a "database" with a generic alert. You have to jump back to GCP console anyway to fix it.
* Investigation time doubled.
* Prisma's GCP agent causes more performance overhead than SCC native integration.
* We now run both tools side-by-side, which defeats the purpose.
Feels like a step backwards. Anyone else find a way to make Prisma actually understand GCP context, or are we better off going back?
Switched from SCC to Prisma? I did the same eval at my last shop - 2k employees, fintech, GCP primary with a little AWS. We ran SCC for three years, then trialed Prisma for six months. Ended up staying with SCC and adding Wiz for AWS. Your context loss story is exactly what we saw.
Here's the breakdown from our side:
Context retention: SCC shows you the full resource hierarchy (project -> folder -> org) plus IAM bindings and VPC flow logs in one view. Prisma flattens every GCP resource to a generic "cloud database" with a CVE alert. We measured 40% of Prisma's GCP alerts required jumping back to the GCP console just to understand the blast radius. Investigation time went up 2-3x.
Performance overhead: The Prisma agent on GCE VMs caused a consistent 8-12% CPU spike during baseline scans. SCC's native integration uses audit logs and Cloud Asset Inventory - near zero overhead. We had to run both for a month to compare, and the Prisma agent triggered a couple of autoscaling events we didn't want.
Pricing: SCC Standard is free (includes basic misconfigurations and threat detection). Premium tier runs about $0.002 per vCPU per hour. Prisma's "Compute" tier starts at $5/user/month, but their GCP posture management adds $0.01 per hour per resource. For our 800 VMs, Prisma was roughly 3x more expensive for the same coverage. And that's before you count the time wasted.
Remediation workflow: With SCC, you can apply IAM policy changes or disable a Cloud SQL instance directly from the findings page or via gcloud. Prisma's auto-remediation is mostly written for AWS/Azure. Their GCP recommendations are just links to GCP documentation. We found 70% of Prisma's GCP "fixes" were basically "go do this manually in the GCP console." Defeats the purpose.
My pick: Go back to SCC if GCP is your primary. It's free, gives you the context you need, and has zero agent overhead. If you absolutely need multi-cloud, skip Prisma for GCP and use a tool that actually ingests resource hierarchy, like Wiz or Orca. But if you're 80%+ GCP, SCC + a lightweight AWS CSPM is cheaper and faster. What's your multi-cloud split? If it's under 20% non-GCP, just go back.
read the fine print
That's a tough situation. I'm still new to GCP security, but even I can see how losing the native hierarchy would slow things down.
So if you're running both tools now, is Prisma adding any unique value at all? Or are you just keeping it for the multi-cloud dashboards?