Our Cloud Security Punch-Out series comprises short-form comparison videos pitting Orca Security head-to-head against some of the world’s largest cloud security solutions. Each match starts with a quick scenario review, followed by a comparison of each solution. In this match, we put both Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud and Prisma Cloud Compute in the ring. We evaluated them on June 12th and July 1st, 2020, respectively.
We went toe-to-toe regarding ease of deployment and coverage, as well as the practical ability of alert findings to reduce our overall exposure risk.
Prisma Cloud is the cloud security posture manager (CSPM) side of the product and is an acquisition from Redlock, while Prisma Cloud Compute is the workload/container security module acquired from Twistlock. Despite these acquisitions being almost two years old, both sides of the Prisma product remain completely separate. For this reason, we decided to review each as a distinct product. That said, we also created a third summary incorporating the results of both. Links to each appear at the bottom of this blog post.
Our series lab is representative of a real-world cloud computing environment but smaller. It’s a single AWS deployment with EC2 instances, containers, load balancers, and S3 buckets. It contains a single VPC having both public and private subnets and an internet gateway provisioned to permit inbound traffic.
Our goal was to be clear, direct, and as objective as possible throughout the comparison. In some cases, we found that Prisma Cloud had features that performed better than Orca.
However, despite the PANW Prisma Cloud suite having a fair bit of functionality, it didn’t take twelve rounds to determine a winner. The bulk of Prisma Cloud alerts weren’t especially useful in helping us reduce our risk of exposure, and Prisma Cloud Compute had significant gaps both in coverage and quality of results.