Securing the Cloud is Critical to Realizing its Potential

The future of enterprise technology lies in the cloud. Most IT departments have already started transitioning their infrastructures, and those that haven’t soon will. Gartner estimates that by 2024 more than 45% of IT spend on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software and business process outsourcing will shift from traditional on-premise solutions to the cloud, with over $300 billion of forecasted spend on public cloud services in 2021. The business benefits are clear: dramatic improvements in agility, innovation and, ultimately, competitiveness. Yet as enterprises shift gears from not only deploying to also maintaining their new cloud infrastructures, they’re realizing the importance of one threshold capability: security.

Despite the cloud’s numerous advantages, it poses some significant new security challenges. In cloud environments, companies neither own nor maintain their own infrastructure, and developers can easily spin up workloads outside the awareness of security and IT teams. This lack of control and visibility means that CISOs are often fighting the cloud security battle with one hand tied behind their backs, unaware of their risks and unequipped to monitor or protect their cloud assets effectively. In fact, more than 80% of IT professionals are concerned that their organizations have already suffered major cloud breaches that they have yet to discover. As companies move more of their infrastructures to the cloud, security professionals will need solutions to help them view, monitor, and protect their cloud workloads.

Why “Lift and Shift” Doesn’t Work

Despite the massive differences between cloud and on-prem infrastructures, most cloud security tools today still rely on the same agent and network scanning-based techniques that have been used for decades in the on-prem world. These solutions require either significant investment into vast agent deployments or use of low fidelity external scanning, neither of which scale to meet the requirements of the cloud.

For starters, using agents for cloud visibility restricts security coverage only to assets that are known and accessible. With fast DevOps-led cloud infrastructure creation, developers become responsible for, but are often not focused on, deploying and managing these agents on VMs, containers, and other resources. Over time, cloud workloads naturally fall through the cracks and become invisible, unseen risks to security teams. Even if teams are able to successfully embed agents across most of their environments, those agents themselves require constant upkeep and maintenance and run the risk of impacting resource and workload performance.

In contrast, traditional networking scanning tools don’t require agents but suffer from limited fidelity into actual resources, may miss critical assets and vulnerabilities, and can even shut down sensitive workloads. Even configuration scanning tools developed specifically for the cloud provide only shallow coverage and cannot get the detailed asset-level data needed to detect critical risks, including unpatched vulnerabilities and malware.

Securing the cloud is materially different from securing on-prem infrastructure and requires a new strategy. Thankfully there’s Orca — and its fundamentally new approach to optimizing security in the cloud.

Orca Security Provides a Radical Improvement to Cloud Security

Orca Security eliminates the challenges of agents and network scanners for organizations that need to protect their cloud environments. Orca is a 100% agentless platform that leverages its unique SideScanning™ technology to provide workload-deep coverage of all cloud assets within minutes. Beyond its comprehensive asset coverage and workload-deep data, Orca layers contextual information from cloud service providers to prioritize security risks based not only on underlying vulnerabilities but also on their exposure and breach impact. This allows security professionals to quickly understand their cloud environment and attack surface as well as rapidly address their most significant risks and security gaps.

Orca’s differentiated approach maximizes what it refers to as the ‘3 Cs’:

Comprehensive — Orca can detect vulnerabilities, malware, lateral movement risk, unsecured customer data, over-permissive roles and more on a single platform, freeing customers from having to patch together multiple tools for cloud security.

Coverage without friction — Orca covers 100% of workloads across cloud environments and requires a quick, one-time infrastructure-level integration regardless of how many workloads a customer has.

Contextualized risk assessment — Orca puts an end to alert fatigue by prioritizing the alerts that really matter to security teams. Orca assess risk not just based on the underlying security issue, but also its exposure and impact on the business.

The power of Orca’s technology is evident in talking to its customers. They love Orca — and love is a rarely used word among IT providers discussing vendors! Orca gives customers the visibility and control they want and need. Customers frequently highlight the power of Orca’s seamless implementation and fast time-to-value, as well as its unparalleled breadth and depth of coverage. Orca’s growth has been tremendous, as it has quickly become the central security solution for many forward-thinking enterprises.

CapitalG’s Investment in Orca Security

We are honored and excited to lead Orca’s Series C and to partner with Avi, Gil and the rest of the incredible Orca team on their journey to revolutionize cloud security. We’re huge believers not only in Orca’s vision to reinvent security for the cloud but also in the team’s proven ability to turn that vision into a reality. We’re thrilled to support the Orca team on their journey.

Read more about what Orca is building here!