Minutes, 30 seconds, 15 seconds: how to read cloud security speed claims

The figures on this site

From vendor pages read in September 2026 and on 11 October 2026, quoted as the vendors' claims:

• Orca Security states that SideScanning "deploys in minutes".
• Upwind states that its live inventory is "refreshed every 30 seconds", with "15 seconds to detect" and "93% noise reduction".
• Wiz states it is used by "more than 65% of Fortune 100" companies, a reach figure rather than a speed figure.
• Aqua Security states it is used by "more than 500 of the world's largest enterprises".
• Sysdig's docs state compliance "Results are displayed about 5-10 minutes after connection", varying with scale.
• SentinelOne states "Connect Your Cloud. See Results Immediately." with no time figure.

Deployment time

"Deploys in minutes" describes how long it takes to connect the platform, typically creating a read-only role in a cloud account and registering it. It does not describe how long the first full scan of a large estate takes, which depends on the number of workloads, accounts and regions. For a coverage buyer the useful number is time to first complete inventory, which you can only measure on your own accounts.

On this site, Orca's deployment claim is one input to its path to first findings score of 9.0, and the reason labels it as a vendor claim. The larger input is that no agent is needed before the first inventory.

Refresh interval

"Refreshed every 30 seconds" describes how current the inventory is once running. It matters for short-lived workloads: a container that lives for two minutes is more likely to be seen by a frequent refresh than by a daily scan. Ask which parts of the inventory refresh at that rate, and whether it depends on a sensor.

Time to detect

"15 seconds to detect" describes runtime detection: the gap between an event and an alert. That is a sensor measurement, not a coverage one, and it only applies to workloads where the sensor runs. Upwind scores 9.4 on our runtime criterion.

Noise reduction

"93% noise reduction" compares the number of findings shown after prioritization with some baseline. The baseline is not stated on the page reviewed, so the percentage cannot be compared with any other vendor's.

Reach figures

Fortune 100 shares and enterprise counts describe who buys a product. They say something about vendor stability and integration demand, which our integrations criterion reflects, and nothing about how fast a platform covers your estate.

How to test the claims that matter

1. Time from access granted to first complete inventory, on the same accounts for every platform.
2. Share of your mapped workloads in that inventory, by type.
3. For refresh: create a short-lived workload and see whether it appears.
4. For detection: run a harmless test event on a host with the sensor and time the alert.

Lesson 6 sets out the full trial. A figure you measured is worth more than any figure on this page, including ours.