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Advancing the open-source cloud security tool into an intuitive SaaS heavyweight.
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TLDR
Prowler is the most widely used open-source cloud security platform. Their success is a direct result of a talented team who has built vital scanning capabilities that help organizations identify cloud vulnerabilities, active misconfigurations, and compliance drift.
Mainstream competitors gained market interest due to their enterprise-oriented features. However, these platforms simply lacked the transparent, developer-forward, principles Prowler bakes into their unique offerings.
Reuniting from our last time working together (Prowler: 5 Weeks To Deliver) we continued to advance the product's design language and shape tooling into a more approachable experience while preserving technical depth. The outcome gives users simple and scalable workflows, deeper risk identification & prioritization, and an Agentic AI layer designed to be a companion rather than the replacement.
Data Visualization
Opportunity:
Upgrading the primary visual landscape.
Advancing an organization’s view into its scan data was a primary goal. Matching data dispaly with the querie type and data output. Interactive state changes and tooltips improve interpreted meaning and context for users.
Dashboards should show a story
Dashboard views distill a security engineer’s perspective into risk severity and trend categories. This paradigm was applied consistently across dashboard types, allowing each layout to reveal a focused perspective. Users start with a high-level overview and drill into details for specific objects.
Semantic Tokens Into A Design System
Problem:
Consistency breaks without systematic guidelines.
A crucial part of building Prowler’s new look and feel was empowering development to implement components and themes efficiently. Cross-team communication and collaboration is vital to establishing a tokenized language that's easy to maintain, meet baseline accessibility standards, and could scale across the full hierarchy of design components.
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Security Findings
Problem:
Individual Findings was a redundant view.
The Findings Page was an area I wanted to continue improving. User feedback showed that identifying security findings across multiple resources was a repetitive experience when working with real scan data. Introducing Findings Groups into the hierarchy made it easier to identify a check and quickly drill into each impacted resource.
Hey paginate!
Findings Groups simplified the overall user experience but introduced a new challenge for pagination. To preserve visibility into each nested relationship, I proposed linking row limits to groups. When a group is expanded, the window of impacted resources reveals all associated findings within an expanding viewport, rendered with infinite scrolling.
Easier Onboarding
Problem:
Individually linking cloud accounts is tiring.
User feedback highlighted frustrations with the manual process of individually linking cloud accounts. For organizations with large, complex infrastructures, swift account setup is essential to broader adoption.
And we research...
To overcome this problem, I had to understand the underlying technical composition. Alongside competitive research, I dug into AWS documentation to understand how an IAM scan role could be automated across an organization’s accounts.
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A strategic extention to the existing workflow
The flow for linking cloud accounts needed to accommodate a growing list of cloud providers as Prowler’s team continuously expanded access. I added a new branch while refining the existing flow, allowing users to authenticate their Organization (and/or Org. Unit), view and manage associated cloud accounts, then validate connections and schedule scan routines.
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Repeatable onboarding schema
The technical workflow for linking an account is orchestrated between Prowler and the cloud console, requiring users to switch between platforms to enter and execute authentication details. A universal progress bar sets expectations for each step without becoming overly specific, allowing the same pattern to be learned and applied across account onboarding, regardless of linking method or cloud provider: Link Provider → Authenticate → Validate → Schedule Scan.
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Streamlining user needs
Connecting multiple cloud accounts in one step opened up opportunities for other bulk actions. Users wanted an easier way to schedule scans across multiple accounts, so this became a fast follow-up that gave organizations the ability to schedule Prowler scans during periods of low traffic.
Agentic AI
Opportunity:
Agentic AI becomes a useful tool, not a mandate.
Lighthouse AI is Prowler’s latest innovation in cloud security. This agentic AI defender supports seamless MCP integrations and a customizable LLM engine. Seeing its potential as an assistant for less technical users, I wanted to explore a more approachable way to access complex AI tooling.
Outlining guiding principles helped keep the design focused on a people-centric tool rather than conflating Lighthouse AI with an unrealistic promise of autonomy.
AI as a tool...
Must be purposeful and transparent, giving guidance and never feel obscure.
Must compliment the product's landscape and never feel intrusive or force an interactive burden.
Must never assume to take action without human oversight to confirm the direction.
A dedicated workspace
To preserve token usage, Lighthouse AI was given dedicated real estate for security analysis workflows. To help users kick off investigations, UI prompts surface common starting points and evolve contextually as the investigation deepens, resources are defined, and compliance frameworks are identified.
Distinguishing AI observations from conversation
A key UX challenge for AI is making the clear distinction between security data observed and the conversation surrounding it. Lighthouse AI's visual treatment of response types help users distinguish between what it is observing, how it is interpreting, and what it is prompting for action.
Actions should always require human approval, giving users control over execution for better security operations.
Showcase: Ideas Into An Interfaces
Outcome
Prowler continued its advancement to become the most widely adopted cloud security platform, turning complex security data into something people can understand, reason about, and act on.
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Their dedication and innovation was recognized at Black Hat Asia 2026, winning the Startup Spotlight. Prowler is a team of passionate people who continue pushing cloud security forward without losing sight of its community or its commitment to open source. For the second time around, I’m happy to have worked with such a great team.
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