Privacy-First Cloud Audits in the EU - No PII Needed

Takeaway: You can cut cost and improve reliability/observability without any access to PII or raw logs. Here’s the artifact-only method I use.

Why this works

Most performance/cost failures live in patterns & policies (autoscaling, retries, retention) not in user data. So inspection needed for signals and structure, not payloads.

What to check as inputs (no PII)

• Billing exports (GCP BigQuery export / AWS CUR)
• IaC (Terraform modules), autoscaling & alert rules
• Logging/metrics schemas (+ retention), aggregated charts: p95/p99, 5xx, queue lag
• Architecture diagrams, runbooks, incident summaries (redacted)

What can be analyzed (examples)

• Reliability: retry storms, queue lag vs consumers, DLQ policy, alert fatigue
• Latency: p95/p99 tails, cold starts/GC signatures, saturation, query latency logs
• Observability: missing SLIs/SLOs, noisy alerts, unbounded logs
• Cost: wrong SKUs, mis-sizing, egress hotspots, over-retention

Example: aggregated latency schema

service, endpoint, date, count, p50_ms, p95_ms, p99_ms, error_rate

Optional: one possible way to get rough p95 from a sample table in BigQuery (no payloads)

SELECT
  service, endpoint, DATE(ts) AS d,
  COUNT(*) AS n,
  APPROX_QUANTILES(latency_ms, 100)[OFFSET(95)] AS p95_ms,
  SUM(CASE WHEN status>=500 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)/COUNT(*) AS error_rate
FROM telemetry_samples
WHERE ts >= TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 7 DAY)
GROUP BY service, endpoint, d;

How we can help you for that

Security & GDPR stance

• Default: no PII, no tenant access, no extraction
• EU-only processing, NDA; DPA only if you later add tenant-only read-only
• Notes auto-deleted <= 30 days

Deliverables you get in 2 weeks

• Top 10 findings with screenshots/tables (aggregates only)
• 3 Day-7 Quick Wins your team can do immediately
• 90-day roadmap (owner, effort, impact, risk)
• Optional SLO baseline + alert/runbook templates

Want a 1-page checklist to run this audit internally? Email me and I’ll send it.