As businesses migrate more workloads to the cloud and adopt multi-cloud strategies, the complexity of managing security across different platforms has grown exponentially. This is where Prowler, an open-source cloud security platform, emerges as a critical tool for modern DevSecOps teams.

The Growing Cloud Security Challenge

The cloud security landscape in 2025 presents several formidable challenges that make tools like Prowler not just useful, but essential:

Configuration Drift and Human Error

Cloud misconfigurations have become the leading cause of data breaches and security incidents. With cloud services constantly evolving and new features being added regularly, maintaining proper security configurations across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms requires continuous vigilance. Manual oversight simply cannot keep pace with the rate of change in cloud environments.

Compliance Complexity

Organizations today must navigate an increasingly complex web of compliance requirements. From CIS benchmarks and NIST frameworks to industry-specific regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR, maintaining compliance across multiple standards while operating in multi-cloud environments presents a significant operational burden. Studies show that 52% of organizations view compliance with multiple frameworks as a top concern.

Visibility Gaps

As cloud environments grow in complexity, maintaining comprehensive visibility into security postures becomes increasingly difficult. Traditional security tools often provide fragmented views, making it challenging to understand the overall risk landscape across different cloud providers and services.

Resource Constraints

Security teams are often understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of security checks required across modern cloud infrastructures. Manual security assessments are time-consuming, error-prone, and don't scale with the dynamic nature of cloud environments.

What is Prowler?

Prowler is an open-source security tool designed to address these challenges head-on. It serves as a comprehensive cloud security platform that performs automated security assessments across multiple cloud providers including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft 365, and Kubernetes environments.

Prowler

Open Cloud Security platform for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, M365...

At its core, Prowler operates as both a security auditing tool and a continuous monitoring solution. It systematically evaluates cloud configurations against established security frameworks and best practices, providing organizations with actionable insights to improve their security posture.

Key Features and Capabilities

Multi-Cloud Support

Prowler's strength lies in its ability to provide unified security assessments across different cloud platforms. Whether your organization operates in a single cloud or employs a multi-cloud strategy, Prowler offers consistent security evaluation criteria and reporting formats.

Comprehensive Security Checks

The platform includes over 500 security checks covering various aspects of cloud security:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) configurations
• Network security settings
• Data encryption and storage security
• Logging and monitoring configurations
• Resource configurations and hardening

Compliance Framework Coverage

Prowler supports numerous compliance frameworks and standards, including:

• CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks
• NIST 800-53 and NIST Cybersecurity Framework
• PCI-DSS for payment card industry compliance
• HIPAA for healthcare organizations
• GDPR for data protection
• SOC 2 for service organization controls
• FedRAMP for federal agencies
• ISO 27001 and many others

Flexible Deployment Options

Organizations can deploy Prowler in various ways to fit their operational requirements:

• Local workstation execution for ad-hoc assessments
• EC2 instances or container environments for scheduled scans
• AWS Fargate for serverless execution
• CI/CD pipeline integration for continuous security validation
• Cloud Shell environments for quick assessments

Advanced Reporting and Integration

Prowler generates detailed reports in multiple formats and can integrate with existing security ecosystems. Reports can be customized to focus on specific compliance requirements or security domains, and the tool supports integration with AWS Security Hub for centralized security findings management.

Practical Applications and Use Cases

Continuous Security Monitoring

Organizations use Prowler to implement continuous security monitoring by scheduling regular scans of their cloud environments. The tool automatically identifies security deviations and configuration drift, enabling teams to address issues before they become security incidents.

Compliance Auditing

For compliance-driven industries, Prowler serves as an automated auditing tool that can generate compliance reports demonstrating adherence to various regulatory frameworks. This significantly reduces the manual effort required for compliance assessments and provides audit trails for regulatory reviews.

Security Hardening

Development and operations teams use Prowler to validate security configurations during deployment processes. By integrating Prowler into CI/CD pipelines, organizations can ensure that new deployments meet security standards before going live.

Incident Response and Forensics

During security incidents, Prowler can quickly assess the overall security posture of affected environments, helping incident response teams understand potential attack vectors and ensure comprehensive remediation.

Risk Assessment and Prioritization

Prowler's findings help security teams prioritize remediation efforts by identifying high-risk configurations and providing context about potential security impacts.

Getting Started with Prowler

Installation and Basic Setup

Prowler offers several installation methods to fit different environments and preferences. Here are the most common approaches:

Using pipx (Recommended) pipx is a tool to install Python applications in isolated environments and is the recommended method for global installation:

python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath
pipx install prowler

Using pip For direct Python installation (note that this modifies your current environment):

pip install prowler

Using Docker Compose For containerized environments with persistent configuration:

# Download the docker-compose.yml from the repository
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prowler-cloud/prowler/master/docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d

Note: For additional installation options including Git clone, AWS CloudShell, Azure CloudShell, Homebrew, and platform-specific packages, check out the official GitHub README for complete installation instructions.

Running Your First Scan

To perform a basic AWS security assessment:

prowler aws

For specific compliance frameworks:

prowler aws --compliance cis_2.0_aws

To scan specific services or regions:

prowler aws --service s3 ec2 --region us-east-1 us-west-2

Customizing Checks

Prowler allows organizations to customize security checks based on their specific requirements. Teams can disable certain checks that aren't relevant to their environment or create custom checks for organization-specific security requirements.

Report Generation and Analysis

Prowler generates comprehensive reports in various formats including JSON, CSV, HTML, and can send findings directly to security hubs. Organizations typically establish workflows to review findings, track remediation progress, and maintain security metrics over time.

Best Practices for Implementation

Start with a Baseline Assessment

Begin by running a comprehensive scan across all cloud environments to establish a security baseline. This initial assessment helps identify immediate priorities and provides a foundation for measuring improvement over time.

Integrate into DevOps Workflows

Incorporate Prowler into CI/CD pipelines to catch security issues early in the development lifecycle. This shift-left approach prevents security problems from reaching production environments.

Establish Regular Scanning Schedules

Implement automated, regular scanning schedules to monitor for configuration drift and new security issues. Daily or weekly scans are common depending on the rate of change in your environment.

Customize for Your Environment

Take advantage of Prowler's customization capabilities to tailor checks and reports to your organization's specific security requirements and compliance needs.

Create Response Workflows

Establish clear processes for reviewing Prowler findings, assigning remediation tasks, and tracking resolution progress. Integration with ticketing systems can help automate these workflows.

The Business Impact

Organizations implementing Prowler typically see significant improvements in several key areas:

• Reduced Security Risk: Automated identification and remediation of security issues leads to a stronger overall security posture and reduced likelihood of successful attacks.
• Compliance Efficiency: Automated compliance reporting and continuous monitoring significantly reduce the time and effort required for regulatory compliance activities.
• Operational Efficiency: Security teams can focus on high-value strategic activities rather than manual configuration reviews and compliance checking.
• Cost Optimization: Many security misconfigurations also represent cost optimization opportunities, as Prowler often identifies over-provisioned resources or inefficient configurations.
• Faster Incident Response: Having continuous visibility into security configurations enables faster incident response and more effective remediation.

Conclusion

As cloud adoption continues to accelerate and security threats evolve, tools like Prowler become indispensable for maintaining robust cloud security postures. Its open-source nature, comprehensive coverage, and practical approach to cloud security assessment make it an excellent choice for organizations of all sizes.

The key to success with Prowler lies not just in running scans, but in integrating it into your organization's broader security culture and operational processes. When properly implemented, Prowler serves as both a powerful security tool and an enabler of DevSecOps practices, helping organizations achieve the delicate balance between security, compliance, and operational agility.

For organizations serious about cloud security, Prowler represents a practical, cost-effective solution that can significantly enhance security postures while reducing the operational burden on security teams. As the cloud security landscape continues to evolve, having tools like Prowler in your security arsenal isn't just recommended—it's essential.