Wiz vs Orca vs Prisma Cloud: 7 questions that decide a POC

Most cloud security proofs of concept are run badly — not because the buyer is careless, but because every platform demos well. Point any of them at a messy AWS account and findings appear. That is table stakes, and a POC that only proves it tells you nothing about which tool to buy.

The seven questions below are the ones worth asking during the trial, while you still have hands on the product and a vendor engineer on the call. Each one is answerable inside a two-week POC, and each separates platforms that look identical in a demo. For the full week-by-week list of 30 questions, including setup, accuracy and cost, see Wiz vs Orca POC: 30 questions to ask in any CNAPP trial.

If you're evaluating cloud security platforms in 2026, your shortlist probably reads: Wiz, Orca Security, Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud (check whether your quote says Cortex Cloud) — and maybe us. We describe nobody else's product here; for that, read each vendor's own pages, or our Wiz alternatives post, which quotes them with sources and dates. And if a vendor tells you their competitors are bad products, stop trusting that vendor.

So this is not that post. Instead, here are the seven questions we believe actually separate cloud security platforms — the ones that predict whether the tool still works for you two years in. We'll give you Onam's answer to each, on the record. Then run the same checklist against every vendor on your shortlist and compare answers side by side.

The seven questions that separate platforms

1. How many clouds get *first-class* treatment?

Every platform says "multi-cloud." The question is which clouds get the full engine depth and which get a check-the-box connector. If you run anything on Oracle Cloud (OCI), Alibaba Cloud, or IBM Cloud — common in finance, manufacturing, and Asia-Pacific enterprises — ask each vendor to demo those clouds, not AWS.

Onam's answer: posture rules on all 7 clouds — AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud and Kubernetes — through one rule engine and one compliance mapping, and we publish the per-cloud rule counts rather than only the total. Depth is not identical everywhere: some identity analysis, such as unused-permission and shadow-admin detection, is AWS-only today, and our docs say which.

2. Is the analysis cross-cloud, or per-cloud silos side by side?

Real attack paths cross boundaries: an exposed GCP service account key that can assume a role into your AWS production account is invisible to any tool that analyses each cloud separately. A dashboard that displays seven clouds is not the same as a graph that correlates them.

Onam's answer: one graph across all clouds, fed by posture, identity, network, data and threat-detection evidence. Attack-path entry points include other clouds, and federation between clouds is modelled as an edge, so a path can cross a provider boundary.

3. Agentless — and what does onboarding take?

Deployment friction predicts coverage: if connecting an account takes a change-management ticket, half your estate never gets connected. Ask for the exact onboarding steps and every permission each one grants.

Onam's answer: no agents on your hosts. Posture scanning connects through read-only cloud roles; agentless workload scanning runs inside your account. You connect a cloud with a template run in your own account, so every permission is readable first. For AWS we store no secret — Onam assumes your role; where a cloud needs a stored credential, it is kept in AWS Secrets Manager, encrypted with AWS KMS.

4. How does it prioritise — severity labels or business impact?

An alert firehose with 4,000 "critical" findings is operationally identical to no prioritisation at all. Ask how the platform decides what's first, and whether that reasoning is explainable to your CFO.

Onam's answer: a FAIR-style loss estimate for each finding — a minimum, likely and maximum figure computed from exploit likelihood (EPSS), exposure, records at risk, data sensitivity, asset value and applicable regulations, and raised for findings on attack paths. The inputs are shown next to the figure, so the top of the queue is explainable in business terms, not just CVSS arithmetic.

5. Does it connect findings across engines?

A public subnet is medium. An over-privileged identity is medium. A workload with a critical CVE is high. The same three on one attack path is a breach waiting to happen. Connecting them is the whole point of a unified platform — ask each vendor to show it live.

Onam's answer: attack paths are built from evidence across posture, identity, network, data and threat detection on one graph; only edges confirmed by that evidence are walked, and a high-EPSS vulnerability on a node raises the path's score.

6. Is compliance evidence continuous or point-in-time?

If evidence is generated when you click "export report," you are audit-ready one day per quarter. Ask whether framework mappings update as infrastructure changes.

Onam's answer: 78 frameworks — CIS benchmarks for each cloud, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001:2022, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2 and more — recomputed from the latest findings on every scan, with evidence per control. One finding maps to every framework it affects; auditors get PDF, CSV or Excel exports, not screenshots.

7. Does coverage span code to runtime?

Fixing a misconfiguration in the console while the Terraform that created it stays broken means the finding comes back on the next deploy. Ask whether the platform sees IaC, code, and runtime as one pipeline.

Onam's answer: Code Security scans repositories for SAST, secrets, IaC and dependency issues, and DAST tests a running application when you give it a URL. Code findings are reported on their own today rather than traced to the cloud resource they deploy, so ask every vendor to show that link live rather than take it on trust — including us.

The checklist, in one table

Our bet, stated plainly

Onam's bet is that cloud security is increasingly decided by posture coverage on every cloud you run, including OCI, Alibaba Cloud and IBM Cloud, one graph instead of separate modules, and prioritisation a CFO can read. That's what we built. We are a young company with no public reference customers yet, and no runtime sensor; if either is your first filter, weigh it.

The honest way to decide is the checklist above. Run it against all four of us. We'll take our chances.

Want Onam's answers demonstrated on your own environment instead of a slide deck? Request a demo.