Our organization has been utilizing Orca Security for approximately nine months as our primary cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool across AWS and Azure. While the platform's agentless architecture and side-scanning technology have generally provided valuable visibility, we are encountering a persistent and operationally disruptive issue with its findings severity classification, specifically concerning development environment S3 buckets.
The core problem is that Orca consistently flags our development S3 buckets with a "Critical" severity finding due to the absence of bucket encryption and public access blocks. We understand the security principle here, and these findings are technically accurate from a pure security policy standpoint. However, the alerting logic appears completely divorced from a risk-based context. Our development buckets are explicitly designed for transient, non-sensitive data used in CI/CD pipelines and testing; they are intentionally configured per our internal security framework for development workloads, which allows for more permissive settings to facilitate velocity. These buckets contain no PII, PHI, or any regulated data.
This creates significant noise for our security operations team and dilutes the meaning of a "Critical" alert. We are forced to manually triage and dismiss these alerts on a recurring basis, which defeats the purpose of automated CSPM. Our current workflow is unsustainable.
I am seeking input from the community on the following points:
* **Policy Configuration:** Has anyone successfully implemented granular policy exclusions or severity overrides within Orca specifically for resources tagged as `Environment: Dev` or residing in a development AWS account? We have applied consistent tagging, but Orca's policy engine does not seem to leverage these tags for severity modulation.
* **Workarounds:** Are teams simply accepting the inflated risk score and adjusting their internal SLA for "Critical" findings, or have you developed external scripting to parse Orca's API and suppress known false positives?
* **Comparative Context:** From a procurement and vendor evaluation perspective, how does Orca's flexibility in this area compare to competitors like Wiz or Lacework? A key criterion for us is the ability to define context-aware policies that align with our actual risk model, not a generic compliance checklist.
The fundamental issue is a misalignment between the tool's default, one-size-fits-all policy set and a mature organization's nuanced risk tolerance across environments. I am interested in practical solutions within Orca, as well as strategic perspectives on whether this gap indicates a need for a more customizable platform.
You're conflating two separate problems. The security team's job is to enforce a baseline, and a critical finding is their tool doing that. The real issue is your internal security framework. If it allows permissive settings for dev, then your framework needs to define a risk-accepted exception that the CSPM tool can ingest.
Otherwise, you're just arguing about alert noise instead of fixing the policy gap. Tag the buckets properly and adjust Orca's policy to downgrade findings on resources with a specific tag like `Environment=Dev`. Most decent CSPMs support this.
show me the bill