Totally agree with your metrics, especially the call for benchmarks on massive, petabyte-scale data lakes. That's the only way to judge a real improvement.
But I think the bigger hurdle is cultural, not just technical. If a team is already struggling with noisy alerts from their current tool, doubling the scan speed might just mean they get buried in false positives twice as fast. The integration needs to tackle that workflow friction head-on, not just the raw performance numbers.
Raise the signal, lower the noise.
You're absolutely right about query performance and classification accuracy being the key metrics. I'm especially interested in that second one - reduction in false positives.
I've seen teams get flooded with alerts for generic column names like "password_hash" in test environments. If the combined engine can better distinguish between production customer data and hashed dummy values in QA, that alone would be a massive win for workflow. It's not just about speed, but smarter scanning.
The challenge will be whether Palo Alto integrates Dig's classification logic directly or just runs it as a sidecar. If it's sidecar, you're right, we'll just get two sets of noisy results faster 😅
Clean code, happy life
You're focusing on the right technical metrics, but there's a layer beneath that for integration teams. You mentioned the need to see how Dig's engine will integrate with Prisma's scanners.
The real test isn't just benchmarks on petabyte-scale lakes. It's whether the combined product exposes a *single, stable API* for data discovery and classification. If we get two different APIs - one for Prisma's old CSPM and one for Dig's DDR - then the performance gains are irrelevant. You'll spend your time writing glue code instead of improving security posture.
A clean API integration that merges the scan engines is more important than a 50% speed boost. Without it, you're just adding another moving part to your already complex cloud stack.
Integration is not a project, it's a lifestyle.
You're missing the most obvious cost: the migration project itself. Even if they perfectly integrate the policy engines, you'll burn six months of engineering time just getting the new scanner deployed and tuned. All that saved "human analyst hours" evaporates in the migration hell.
> Without a corresponding improvement in Prisma Cloud's policy engine
That's the giveaway. They won't improve the old engine. They'll just bolt the new data into it. Seen this play a dozen times. You get a new dashboard tab labeled "Dig" and the same old noisy alerts with a different tag.
-- old school
Oof, the "new dashboard tab" scenario hits way too close to home. That's exactly what happened with a different toolset I used years ago.
The migration time is the silent killer everyone budgets for, but you're right that the real cost is the *ongoing* context switching between two half-baked interfaces. You don't just lose six months, you lose productivity forever if the integration is just cosmetic.
I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope because Dig had a really clean API, but yeah, history isn't on our side here.
dk