With the current economic downturn, businesses are trying to cut costs wherever they can. Although businesses often cite cost savings as one of the reasons when moving their assets to the cloud, some organizations can get a nasty surprise when they receive their monthly cloud provider bill.
It is easy for users to spin up resources and use services but then forget to stop or remove them when they are done. Unfortunately the organization will have to foot the bill, whether the resources are used or not. Several surveys, including Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, report that organizations are wasting as much as one third of their monthly cloud spend.
Cloud Security Management Starts with Visibility
Cloud security starts with complete visibility and efficient resource management, not just to decrease costs, but also to reduce the cloud attack surface. The challenge is that many organizations simply don’t have a full grasp of all the assets they are running in the cloud and what they are being used for, let alone what they are paying for them.
Using Orca’s patented SideScanningTM technology, the Orca Cloud Security Platform has wide insight into all the workloads and services deployed in cloud environments, their configurations, and their usage. Since Orca does not require any agents, it can provide a complete and up-to-date inventory of all the organization’s cloud resources, including any shadow assets.
In addition to using this intelligence to help our customers secure their cloud environments, we are now further leveraging our capabilities to help organizations track, manage and reduce their cloud spend. Unlike other cloud cost management tools, Orca also has full insight into cloud workloads and what they are running. This means that Orca can identify more forgotten or underutilized assets than tools that can only see cloud configurations.
Reduce Overspending with Orca’s Cloud Cost Optimization
We are excited to announce that the Orca Cloud Security Platform now includes a Cloud Cost Optimization framework to automatically identify resources, such as VMs, databases, or other critical cloud assets, that are not being used so organizations can reduce unnecessary cloud consumption and optimize their cloud costs.
Although cloud cost management platforms already exist, Orca is able to leverage its SideScanning technology to identify more cost saving opportunities than dedicated cloud cost platforms, such as disk space that is being paid for but is underutilized and perhaps not needed.
What is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the process where an organization manages its cloud spending cost-effectively while keeping performance and scalability impacts to a minimum. The process typically includes:
- Identifying and eliminating unnecessary or underutilized resources
- Implementing cost-saving strategies and compliance frameworks
- Leveraging tools and techniques to monitor and manage cloud hosting costs
How Does Orca Help Reduce Cloud Spend?
Orca continuously aggregates relevant alerts about unnecessary cloud infrastructure spending on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
The Cost Optimization alerts are then grouped into categories based on the cloud infrastructure that is associated with the excessive spend, namely: VMs, Databases, Keys, and Load Balancers.
Find Out How Much Orca Can Save Your Organization
Start saving money today by test-driving Orca’s Cost Optimization Framework. Sign up for our free 30-day trial and find out how many unused and unattached resources have been left in your environment that you never knew about.
About the Orca Cloud Security Platform
The Orca Cloud Security Platform identifies, prioritizes, and remediates risks and compliance issues across your cloud estate spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. Leveraging its patented SideScanning technology, Orca offers comprehensive cloud security coverage detecting vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, lateral movement, API risks, sensitive data at risk, anomalous events and behaviors, and overly permissive identities. Instead of layering multiple siloed tools together or deploying cumbersome agents, Orca delivers complete cloud security in a single platform.
