Whether IT runs on-premises or in the cloud, there are always gaps in security. The key is to find them before the hackers do.

Orca Security Ltd. has seized an opportunity to capitalize on a security-challenged IT environment by developing what it terms SideScanning security solutions, born in the cloud for the cloud. Orca’s approach is based on two basic tenets: Security will always fail, and using the same on-prem techniques in the cloud will ensure disaster.

“You need to assume that everything will fail all of the time, including all of the controls that you baked in,” said Avi Shua (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Orca. “Audit what’s actually happening in your environment to find the gaps. You cannot use the same methodologies that you used for on-prem because if you use them, you are going to lose.”

In anticipation of the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Thing in Security, AI and Life Sciences event — set to kick off on June 16 — John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with Shua for a special CUBE Conversation on how Orca is focused on providing its customers with cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance. (* Disclosure below.)

Protecting critical workloads

Orca’s cloud-focused solution has propelled it to unicorn status in only two years. The company has led three successful funding raises since last May, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation earlier this year. The firm’s security approach has attracted the interest of data and time intensive firms, according to Shua.

“Our publicly disclosed customer companies have very critical workloads which are time sensitive,” he said. “These are companies like Databricks, Robinhood, Unity, Sisense, Lemonade and many others.”

Orca has built its solution by taking advantage of a cloud native technology that allows it to fully map a client’s IT environment and show how workloads are interacting with various services.

“It enables us to connect to any cloud environment in a way which is as simple as installing a smartphone application and getting full stack visibility of your security posture,” Shua explained. “It means seeing all of the risk, whether it’s a vulnerability, misconfiguration, lateral movement risk or work that had already been compromised, in minutes without deploying any agent or network scanners. It sounds like it can’t happen because we are so used to an on-prem environment where it wasn’t possible in a physical server but it is possible in the cloud.”

Container vulnerability

Hacking operations have become so sophisticated that all it takes is one gap in security systems to set off a cascade of vulnerability. Orca has already witnessed plenty of examples of what can quickly go wrong in the enterprise.

“We see things like services that were launched which nobody maintained for years,” Shua said. “We see things like improper segmentation, where everyone has permission to access everything. Sometimes developers are a bit lazy; they’ll have stored keys that can bypass the entire mechanism.”

One key area of vulnerability in the cloud involves the use of containers. A recent report listed container security as a top priority among 76% of respondents. Yet, the same report found that there was little consensus around who was responsibility in the organization for container security. This represents a prime opportunity for Orca.

“For the first time we can guarantee that if you scan it, we’ll see every instance, every workload, every container,” Shua said. “I will tell you this is a container which is vulnerable; it has permission to access your sensitive data; it’s running on a pod that is indirectly connected to the internet through this load balancer which is exposed. You need the security to be applied to all of your environment and you can’t rely on people to do manual processes, because they will fail.”

Orca does not operate on a “freemium” model, but it does offer free trials from its website where interested parties can scan an IT environment and see for themselves what it turns up. Orca provides its scanning capability across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Wholesale adoption of the cloud has resulted in a dramatic increase in the speed of business, where the role of security has changed from being a check in the process to helping accelerate product delivery as fast as possible. The challenge is to accomplish this without creating more vulnerability.

“Nobody wants to be the one that tells the business you can’t move as fast as you want,” Shua noted. “Can we move fast, and how can we move fast without breaking critical security requirements? Things happen without involvement, and this is a very tough place to be.”

Watch the complete video interview below, be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations, and tune in to theCUBE’s live coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Thing in Security, AI and Life Sciences event on June 16. (* Disclosure: Orca Security sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither Orca nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE