Orca SideScanning

A good analogy for SideScanning is a medical MRI scanner. Instead of using needles and scalpels to conduct invasive exploratory surgery, the MRI machine diagnoses health issues through non-invasive scanning to obtain a detailed picture of all organs and tissues. The patient is never actually touched by the physician during the procedure.

SideScanning is similar in that it visualizes all cloud assets and connectivity to build a complete model of your cloud environment. It then uses this model to determine risk in the proper context without affecting cloud assets or their functionality in any way.

Orca SideScanning doesn’t run on your workloads so it can examine 100% of your cloud environment without impacting your workload performance. And since the SideScanning process doesn’t use agents that require installation, it can be deployed at any time and won’t impact your IT or DevOps teams.

Orca’s patented SideScanning technology deploys in minutes and covers all cloud assets including virtual machines, cloud storage buckets, all types of containers and serverless functions in any mode of deployment, and much more. SideScanning makes it possible to create a comprehensive risk profile of your entire cloud estate – and without sending a single packet over the network or running a single line of code in your environment. Orca’s SideScanning also provides detailed data on compliance issues, file integrity monitoring, log inspection, malware analysis, and more to offer telemetry that other solutions lack.

No. Since the Orca Platform integrates via a cloud provider’s shared virtualization infrastructure and reads the workloads’ run-time block storage out of band, rather than running on the workload itself, it can examine 100% of your cloud environment without sending a single packet over the network or running a single line of code in your environment. The result: no downtime and no impact on workloads or users.

Security solutions that rely on agents or network scanners are slow to deploy and have a significant impact on asset performance. Because it is virtually impossible to deploy agents everywhere, some assets will inevitably be exposed to security threats. And network scanners require open ports that may pose a security risk if not configured and maintained correctly.

The Orca platform deploys in minutes, rather than days or weeks, and it has zero impact on asset performance. Orca also eliminates the risk of visibility gaps as it automatically discovers and monitors all assets across your cloud estate and does not require any updates as new assets are added.

With Orca’s SideScanning technology, you can instantly detect critical cloud security risks across your entire cloud estate without the use of agents or network scanners, avoiding the gaps in coverage, organizational friction, high maintenance costs, and slow deployment times associated with these legacy technologies.

Orca collects metadata from cloud accounts and workloads. This metadata includes security groups, network configurations, vulnerabilities, policies, and other configuration settings. 

Below are some examples of the types of data that Orca collects:

Cloud configuration data:

• Subnets configuration
• IAM configuration and permission list
• VPC configuration
• ELB configuration
• List of running assets

Cloud security issues:

• A vulnerability has been found on VM – X
• Malware was found on container – Y
• PII has been detected on VM – Z
• VM X has SSH enabled with username and password