According to Gartner, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud strategies by 2027. Hybrid cloud architectures blend public cloud deployments with private cloud and/or on-premises environments to create a shared ecosystem. This model allows organizations to retain control over sensitive workloads—running them in private or self-managed environments—while still leveraging the scalability and agility of the public cloud.
Hybrid deployments also help organizations meet complex compliance requirements such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP by enabling greater control over data residency and access.
To address this evolving need, we’re pleased to introduce a groundbreaking enhancement: runtime protection for hybrid cloud environments. This marks a significant first in the cloud security market, extending the advanced protection of Orca Sensor beyond public cloud to also cover private cloud and on-premises environments—providing consistent, unified runtime threat detection and response across all environments.
This release also brings several powerful additions to our runtime security capabilities, including:
- Expanded runtime detections for a wider range of active threats
- Runtime support for Windows operating systems
- AI Assistant for accelerated threat investigation and response
While the new release will be generally available soon, interested customers and prospects can register early to reserve access and be among the first to benefit from the new capabilities once they launch.
What does the new Orca Sensor release include?
Four significant enhancements headline this release, including:
#1. Hybrid cloud runtime protection
Challenge: Most existing runtime security solutions only protect public cloud deployments, leaving private cloud and on-prem environments exposed. This creates visibility and protection gaps for hybrid organizations and limits their ability to apply consistent threat detection policies across environments.
Solution: Orca eliminates these gaps by delivering full runtime detection and alerting capabilities across hybrid deployments. Organizations can now achieve unified, real-time protection for public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem workloads—without sacrificing detection depth or visibility.
#2. New real-time Sensor detections
Challenge: The average cloud asset now contains 115 vulnerabilities, according to the 2025 State of Cloud Security Report. As organizations scale in the cloud, attackers are taking advantage of this growing attack surface. VulnCheck reported a 20% year-over-year increase in vulnerability exploitation, underlining the urgency for better real-time protection.
Solution: Orca continues to lead in vulnerability reduction with diverse capabilities to prioritize vulnerabilities. Building on this foundation, the latest Sensor update adds new real-time threat detections across several high-risk categories, some of which include:
- Container escape attempts
- Privilege escalation
- Cloud reconnaissance activity
- Suspicious process and network activity
- “Living off the land” (LOTL) techniques leveraging legitimate tools
These new detections give security teams enhanced visibility into stealthy and sophisticated attack patterns—helping them stop threats before damage occurs.
#3. Runtime protection for Windows-based servers and workstations
Challenge: Despite the shift to containerized and Linux-based workloads, many enterprises still rely heavily on Windows operating systems, especially in hybrid environments. Unfortunately, these systems are often left without runtime visibility or behavioral threat detection.
Solution: With this release, Orca extends advanced runtime protection to Windows-based servers and workstations. Organizations can now detect and terminate malicious processes in real time, monitor suspicious behavior, and enforce security policies just as they would for Linux and Kubernetes environments. Integration with Orca’s existing onboarding, alerting, policy creation, and asset visibility workflows ensures seamless deployment and management.
#4. AI Assistant for enhanced threat investigation and response
AI continues to transform security operations, particularly in threat detection and response. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, organizations that extensively use AI identify breaches 100 days faster and reduce breach costs by 33% on average.
As the first CNAPP provider to introduce AI Discovery and Remediation, Orca is excited to unveil AI Assistant for accelerated threat investigation and response. Powered by Orca AI, this capability empowers security teams to triage alerts and investigate threats using natural language questions and guided Q&A workflows—no complex query syntax required.
With AI Assistant, analysts can quickly uncover the root cause of suspicious activity, investigate potential lateral movement, or assess anomalous behavior—all while significantly reducing mean time to response (MTTR).
Command Your Cloud with Orca
Orca offers a unified and comprehensive cloud security platform that identifies, prioritizes, and remediates security risks and compliance issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. The Orca Cloud Security Platform leverages Orca’s patented SideScanning™ technology to provide complete coverage and comprehensive risk detection.
Sign up for the waitlist
Interested in reserving access to the latest Orca Sensor enhancements? Sign up here. Alternatively, schedule a personalized 1:1 demo to see how Orca can command your cloud.
