Growth in cloud security spending is set to overshadow all other segments in the global security and risk management space, according to Gartner, a nod to the tremendous growth of cloud computing globally. 

Despite growing investments, securing cloud-native applications effectively remains a pain point for many organizations and their teams. Security teams are inundated with cloud alerts, with most receiving more than 500 per day and more than half admitting to critical risks on a daily or weekly basis. 

Meanwhile, existing tools and approaches silo cloud risks from the development artifacts and pipelines that produced them, even as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates and container images can reproduce production risks by the hundreds or thousands. 

Realizing the promise of cloud-native applications demands more effective security in the cloud. “More effective” goes beyond finding better solutions to address risks in runtime. Instead, organizations need a revolutionary approach to cloud security that helps prevent issues from leaking into production, traces cloud risks to their code origins, and facilitates fast and easy remediations at the source—from cloud to development.

Revolutionizing Application Security with the Orca Cloud Security Platform

As a true CNAPP, the Orca Cloud Security Platform unifies cloud-native security across the application lifecycle, combining cloud and application security in one platform that provides 100% visibility and fosters effective collaboration through deep integrations with developer tooling. 

The Orca Platform leverages our patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model to combine deep workload insights, threat intelligence, and environmental context and deliver security intelligence where users need it. Orca ensures security teams can see cloud risks in the full context of their code origins, while developers can view security findings in their version control or ticketing system. Orca revolutionizes application security by removing the silos that prevent a full lifecycle approach to securing the cloud. 

With the Orca Platform, security teams gain preventative and proactive measures that enhance the security of their cloud. Security teams can leverage advanced and comprehensive code security scanning, fortified with an extensive suite of built-in and customizable security policies that detect issues and block risky builds from proceeding. This prevents vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks from ever reaching production, reducing cloud alerts and saving teams from the most time-consuming remediations. 

Meanwhile, Orca also empowers teams to streamline cloud-to-code remediation. With the Orca Platform, security teams can immediately trace risks in running cloud assets directly to their code origins and see important metadata, including the code owner, source code repository, and Dockerfile associated with a risk. They can also immediately generate AI-driven code fixes and transform cloud alerts into one-click pull requests directly from Orca, which developers can see in their source code management (SCM) platform. The result accelerates the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), eliminating the guesswork and inefficiencies of cross-team collaboration and greatly enhancing the security of cloud-native applications.  

Orca’s existing capabilities for application security include: 

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security: Safeguards against IaC issues and drift with comprehensive IaC scanning, extensive and customizable security policies, seamless integrations, and more.
  • Software Composition Analysis: Provides advanced protection from vulnerabilities and open-source risks, continuously scanning codebases, container images, and repositories during every code push or pull request.
  • Secrets Detection: Detects, prioritizes, and remediates exposed secrets, leveraging flexible and comprehensive security policies, in-depth secrets scanning, and seamless integrations with developer systems and workflows. 
  • Container image scanning: Provides in-depth and continual scans of all container images, comprehensive and customizable security policies with developer guardrails, and seamless integrations. 
  • Source Code Management Posture Management (SCM-PM): Enables teams to detect and remediate misconfigurations and security risks across SCM accounts and repositories. 

Meanwhile, the Orca Platform enables developers to fix issues on the fly conveniently from their platform of choice. Orca offers deep integrations with SCM platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Azure DevOps, and popular ticketing systems like Jira or ServiceNow. Together, the Orca Platform dramatically simplifies and accelerates cloud-native security, while promoting seamless and effective cross-functional collaboration. 

Meet Orca Application Security (AppSec): Securing Applications from Cloud to Dev

Orca’s commitment to unifying cloud and application security continues with the unveiling of Orca Application Security. The solution offers several new enhancements, which include the following.

#1: Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Challenge: Addressing vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) proves vital to securing applications throughout their lifecycle. And yet, this remains a challenge for organizations and their development teams. The Orca 2024 State of Cloud Security Report found that 62% of organizations have severe vulnerabilities in their code repositories, while another 70% have unencrypted secrets stored there. Both increase the chances that problematic code reaches production environments and lead to security breaches and other severe incidents. 

Solution: Orca’s Application Security solution offers a fully integrated SAST solution that detects and secures vulnerabilities in first-party codebases. Using Orca, security teams can scan custom code against a comprehensive set of security policies to detect exploitable vulnerabilities. These policies set guardrails for developers, enforcing secure coding practices by blocking risky builds and notifying developers of issues. 

Orca’s SAST feature helps security teams prevent runtime risks while giving developers real-time visibility into code issues, allowing them to fix problems on the fly without disrupting their workflows or use of preferred tools.  

#2: Open-Source License Detection

Challenge: Cloud-native applications depend on open-source software (OSS) components, which make up the majority of commercial codebases. While OSS enables developers to boost productivity and streamline workflows, they present important security risks, including licensing requirements. Restrictive licenses can expose organizations to significant legal risks and result in the loss of intellectual property. Security teams often lack visibility into and awareness of OSS licenses, which helps explain why OWASP ranks it among the top 10 risks of OSS

Solution: Orca’s Application Security solution also offers Open-Source License Detection, which automatically identifies all licenses in packages across the application lifecycle. This ensures users can address issues before projects reach production as well as easily search for licenses in runtime across all assets and installed packages. 

The feature gives security and development teams full visibility into each license, its classification, and all relevant metadata, enabling them to identify potential violations, avoid substantial legal risks, and support compliance efforts. License entries include additional context, such as SPDX deprecation status, links to the SPDX website, and OCI approval details.

#3: Orca AI-Driven Remediation for Code

Challenge: Enhancing cloud-native security requires bridging the gap between cloud and application security to fix risks at their source. For example, patching a misconfiguration in runtime allows the same risk to surface in future deployments if the underlying IaC template remains unchanged. Yet fixing issues at their source can prove challenging in complex and fast-moving cloud-native environments, where misconfigurations in cloud assets can span multiple artifacts in development, code ownership is unclear, and finding the responsible team is difficult.  

Solution: With Orca’s AI-Driven Remediation, this process is now fast and seamless. The feature closes the gap between cloud alerts and actionable fixes by enabling one-click pull requests (PRs) directly from the Orca Platform. Teams can now identify misconfigurations and other risks, fix them at the source, and commit secure changes without friction. The feature dramatically improves cloud and application security, simplifying and accelerating effective code attribution and remediation across the application lifecycle. 

Additionally, the feature natively integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps, so users can seamlessly leverage one-click PRs for their preferred source code management (SCM) platform. 

Orca’s expanded AI-Driven Remediation reduces the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), alleviates cross-functional friction, and frees up capacity for high-value activities. 

About the Orca Cloud Security Platform

Orca offers a unified and comprehensive cloud security platform that identifies, prioritizes, and remediates security risks and compliance issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. Leveraging its patented SideScanning™ Technology, the Orca Platform detects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, lateral movement, data risks, API risks, overly permissive identities, and much more.

Learn More

Interested in seeing Orca’s Application Security solution in action? Schedule a personalized 1:1 demo with one of our experts.