Gil Geron is CEO & Co-founder of Orca Security. Gil has greater than 20 years of experience leading and delivering cybersecurity products. Previous to his role as CEO, Gil was chief product officer from the inception of Orca. He’s keen about customer satisfaction and has worked closely with customers to make sure they’re able to thrive securely within the cloud. Gil is committed to providing seamless cybersecurity solutions without compromising on efficiency. Prior to co-founding Orca Security, Gil directed a big team of cyber professionals at Check Point Software Technologies

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that’s trusted by a whole lot of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling within the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world’s most comprehensive coverage and visibility of all risks across the cloud. With continuous first-to-market innovations and expertise, the Orca Platform ensures security teams quickly discover and remediate risks to maintain their businesses secure.

Before founding Orca Security, you worked for a security company called Check Point Software Technologies for over 10 years. What were your key takeaways from this experience?

I rotated positions at Check Point which gave me the chance to dive into many alternative areas of cybersecurity. This helped me develop a real appreciation of the assorted security concerns, challenges, and desires that our customers today face. In my last role, I focused on zero-day detection and threat prevention, which exposed me to the difficulties of choosing the suitable security tools for comprehensive coverage. That have sparked the concept eventually became the muse for Orca. I’m a firm believer that security shouldn’t be complicated and that complete coverage may be achieved without an overreliance on quite a few tools.

Orca Security has eight Co-Founders. Could you share the genesis story of the way you selected to collaborate with such a big team to launch Orca Security?

We’re co-founded by eight senior executives and designers previously from Check Point with a shared revolutionary vision for cloud security; one which dramatically simplifies security without compromise. The choice to work together was a deliberate one driven by the assumption that we could accomplish more together than we ever could on our own.

We recognized the potential to create something truly modern and disruptive within the cloud security space. Traditional security systems weren’t built to handle modern computing demands or manage the transition to cloud infrastructure. We took a daring step and developed the industry’s first agentless cloud security solution, which immediately provides 100% coverage and visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure without having to put in anything in your environment. The flexibility to attain complete coverage without installing agents was a serious need across industries and has been transformational for our customers.

Orca Security’s patented SideScanning technology is at the center of the Orca Platform, are you able to discuss what that is specifically?

Our first-to-market SideScanning™ technology is the usual for the way cloud security must be approached. It accesses the cloud workloads’ runtime block storage and cloud provider APIs to read cloud workloads and configurations without requiring a single agent. This enables Orca to perform fast, wide and deep scans to surface cloud risks without the gaps in coverage, alert fatigue, performance degradation, and operational costs of agent-based solutions. We detect risks at every layer of the tech stack, including vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, at-risk sensitive data, IAM risk, and lateral movement risk, and more.

Are you able to describe your vision of how cloud computing is a possibility to re-architect security?

With the rise of cloud computing, businesses at the moment are afforded greater control over their infrastructure, real-time risk mitigation, and the flexibility to automate threat detection and response. AI has emerged as a key enabler in cloud security, from risk detection to reducing MTTR and lowering the skill threshold for security professionals. Our platform today leverages the ability of AI to boost detection of risks, simplify investigations, and speed up remediation – saving cloud security, DevOps, and development teams effort and time, while significantly improving security outcomes.

What are a number of the challenges behind protecting data on the cloud?

Data proliferation within the cloud, and its increasing complexity are probably the largest data security challenges. It’s very easy to spin up, copy or replicate data within the cloud, and with the rapid adoption of cloud-native application development, use of multiple cloud platforms, and an explosion of microservices it’s difficult to maintain track of all of your data.

Shadow data, the info that security teams will not be aware of, is the largest threat to sensitive data breaches. From a security standpoint, data that’s unknown can’t be protected. It’s vital to acknowledge that, regardless of how meticulous the IT policies are, every company may have shadow data. Subsequently it’s essential that organizations deploy solutions that may discover and classify all their cloud data and show how this data may very well be vulnerable to an attack in order that security teams can prioritize removing these threats.

Orca Security is built on 4 pillars, what are these pillars and why are they so vital?

As we construct out our platform, Orca continues to remain true to the 4 key principles which have driven our mission from the beginning, and without which we firmly consider robust cloud security shouldn’t be achievable. We call them the 4 Cs of Orca:

• Coverage: You can’t protect what you can not see—With our agentless technology, Orca provides users with a single platform that’s effortless to deploy and offers 100% coverage of all cloud assets out of the box, routinely including any recent assets as they’re added.
• Comprehensive: Organizations need a comprehensive approach to cloud security. You shouldn’t must buy one tool to detect vulnerabilities, one other tool to detect misconfigurations and one other tool to uncover authentication or IAM risk—the list goes on. That is ineffective, wastes time and results in alert fatigue and team burnout.
• Context: There may be nothing you’ll be able to realistically do to guard your environment or reply to risks when you don’t have context. Without context you’ll just get an limitless list of issues and alerts which can be very difficult to prioritize. With context, security teams can see their cloud environment like an attacker does, and understand which issues actually put the business in danger versus others which can be less consequential.
• Consumable: A security solution can provide plenty of data, but when it’s not easily consumable, it’s of no use. A cloud security platform should allow teams to look, query, and customize data easily in order that it helps them make data-driven decisions, deploy efforts efficiently, and stay one step ahead in zero-day scenarios.

To this end, we recently released our AI-powered cloud asset search that allows users to ask natural language questions equivalent to ‘Do I even have any log4j vulnerabilities which can be public facing?’ or “Do I even have any unencrypted databases with sensitive data exposed to the Web?”. This enables not only security practitioners, but in addition developers, DevOps, cloud architects, risk governance, and compliance teams to simply and intuitively understand exactly what’s of their cloud environments without requiring any user training or reading through lengthy documentation.

How are innovations in AI addressing larger cloud security concerns for organizations?

The industry is facing a serious cybersecurity skills shortage, Cloud security teams receive a whole lot of alerts every day that require investigation, remediation and response. As cloud environments increase in complexity, more advanced technical skills are needed, further adding to the already existing cloud security skills gap. Here’s where AI could be a game changer. AI’s potential to extend efficiency and lower the skill threshold for cloud security professionals goes to be essential to make sure organizations stay one step ahead of attackers, while fully leveraging technological advances.

Are you able to explain how Orca leverages AI and what advantages it brings?

Orca is on the forefront of leveraging AI, GenAI, and LLMs to enhance cloud security teams. By lowering required skill thresholds, simplifying tasks, and using AI to calculate optimal cloud configurations, Orca dramatically alleviates every day workloads and burnout, and significantly improves cloud security posture. Orca’s AI-driven capabilities enable security teams to maintain up with fast-paced cloud-native development and help remove one of the vital obstacles to organizations’ digital transformation and cloud adoption: cloud security.