Is It Worth Building Our Own Compliance Reporting Pipeline Across Clouds?

It's all about how much time you want to invest in keeping your pipeline running versus just using the reporting tools that the cloud providers offer. Both choices come with their own set of troubles.

One benefit of using a third-party pipeline is the ability to have consistent compliance checks, alerting, and dashboards without depending on each cloud's native tools. You can set one schema and reporting format across your environment. While it won't be zero effort, tools like Orca make implementation and ongoing maintenance much more manageable, especially as audit requirements evolve.

You might spend six months developing your pipeline, then two years just to keep it operational, only to find out that you’ve essentially recreated a subpar version of existing tools. Unless compliance reporting is crucial to your product, I’d recommend buying rather than building.

Building the pipeline isn't the tricky part; keeping it maintained is. Logs often change formats, APIs get updated, and new compliance frameworks pop up. Initially, you might enjoy some consistency, but over time, maintaining your own system can become a real overhead. If you have a complicated setup or require detailed cross-cloud insights not offered by native tools, it could justify the effort. Ultimately, the key question is whether the time you'll save during audits or the insights gained will be worth it.

Maintaining a custom compliance pipeline is a lot more work than most companies realize. At first, it feels exciting and new, but once you face an API deprecation, it quickly turns into a full-time job just to keep things running smoothly.