Ep. 79 Agentless Cloud Security

There are certainly many ways to approach security in today’s complex hybrid federal cloud. raditionally, a manager would look at a system and have an agent assigned to each machine. This could be a virtual machine or a real instance.

This structure goes back to the days of servers in the back room and megabytes of storage.  Once you put a few “zeros” behind some data stores, then you have a problem with scaling.  The business problem is simple: the old “tried-and-true” may have worked for years, but it doesn’t work in the cloud.

When Avi Shua launched Orca Security, he solved the scaling problem with a technique called “side scanning.”  It is kind of like a football team taking a photo of another team’s formation.  The game is not impacted at all, but a person can see what is going on. 

This is what Orca Security does for the federal government.  Doug Hudson explains that their patented technology enables a systems manager to take a “snapshot” of system information and not impact the environment. From there, Orca Security can look at system health.

Orca can go beyond blocking and tackling. Today’s emphasis on continuous integration means that there may be dependencies introduced that have unintended consequences.  Just because a system is acceptable at noon does not mean it is safe after an update has been made.  Technology from Orca Security allows to identify mis configurations that modifications may introduce.

During the interview, Doug Hudson indicated they did not need agents because their innovation allowed them to use native cloud technology to get information out of the cloud ecosystem.

Listen to the interview to get a better understanding of data leakage and the relationship Orca Security has with AWS as well as Snowflake.

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