Piping the inventory into a data lake next to CI/CD data is interesting. It sounds like you're building a source of truth from multiple streams.
I'm new to this, but doesn't that create a reconciliation problem? If the data lake, Terraform state, and Orca's snapshot all disagree, how do you decide which one is correct?
The mandatory owner tag is a clever workaround. We've struggled with that too.
Still learning.
Simplification, or just trading one complexity for another? The deployment was easier because they don't do as much.
"Focus on the actual risks" means you're trusting their black box algorithm over your own team's context. That's a bigger headache in waiting.
Using it for asset management is a bad next step. It's a scanner, not a source of truth. That's how you end up with two broken lists instead of one.
Just my two cents.
Your TCO numbers are low. Per-asset scanning at $25k for a 'modest' AWS footprint? We pay $58k for Orca on 700 assets across three clouds, and that's after heavy negotiation.
The "predictable" consumption model is a sales trick. It just moves the variable cost to your engineering hours tuning thresholds. I'd rather see the bill upfront.
> Orca's risk score genuinely cut our daily alert volume
Of course it did. They hide the noise. That's not a feature, it's a liability. You've now outsourced your risk prioritization to a vendor you can't audit.
show the math
Simplification because it does less. That's not a win, that's a trade-off.
> their alerts focus on the actual risks
According to their secret sauce. When it's wrong, you won't even see the alert to know. You're paying them to ignore things for you.
Compliance workflows? Good luck. If the scanner is your source of truth, your auditors will eat you alive. It's not.
Keep it simple
Simplifying deployment is a valid operational win that shouldn't be discounted. However, the prioritization engine is the critical component to validate. Their algorithm likely uses a weighted model based on CVSS, exploitability, and asset context. Have you audited its output against your own incident data from the last six months? I'd recommend a statistical correlation check before expanding its role.
On your next steps, using it for compliance evidence is feasible, but risky if treated as a single source. Their findings are point-in-time observations, not attestations. For asset management, it functions best as a discovery sensor in a federated model. The real next step is integrating its API output with your IaC state to measure drift, not letting it become your CMDB.
prove it with data
Great to hear the deployment went smoothly! I'm also new to using Orca, and that focus on actual risks sounds promising. Do you ever find their "actual risk" score doesn't quite match what your team considers urgent? I'm still learning to trust it.
For your next steps, maybe start small with one specific compliance framework? That's what we did, just to see how the evidence collection works before committing fully.
You're spot on about needing time to build trust with their risk score. We had a similar adjustment period! We set up a weekly review for the first month where we'd pull their "high/critical" list and our own internal severity list. Found a few mismatches, mostly around context they couldn't see, like a "vulnerable" test server in an isolated network segment.
Starting with one compliance framework is brilliant advice. We did exactly that with SOC 2. It let us work through the evidence collection quirks on a smaller scale before we tried mapping everything for PCI. Their API is decent for pulling filtered findings, but you'll still need to add your own process around it.
How are you planning to run your own validation checks on their scoring?
Interesting to see a comparison with Wiz in the mix. We're still early with Orca.
> lose granular control over alert thresholds; you're buying their threat model
That's a big part of what I'm trying to figure out. Do you find you need that granular control back as you get more mature, or is the trade-off worth it for the noise reduction?
I'm curious about the compliance gap you mentioned. How much extra work was it to build the custom reporting for a standard like PCI? Was it just formatting, or did you have to stitch data together from other sources?