Orca Security announced that the Orca Cloud Security Platform now includes a Cloud Cost Optimization framework that helps organizations reduce unnecessary cloud consumption and optimize their cloud costs while providing unmatched security with the deepest and widest visibility. Leveraging its patented SideScanning technology, Orca is now applying its unparalleled insights into cloud environments to help organizations track, manage and reduce their cloud spend. Unlike other cloud cost management tools, Orca has deep visibility into cloud workloads and what they are running, allowing the platform to identify more opportunities for cloud cost savings.

Despite citing cost savings as one of the reasons to move assets to the cloud, many organizations are facing costly monthly cloud provider bills due to unused and forgotten cloud infrastructure resources. According to Flexera's 2022 State of the Cloud Report, organizations are wasting as much as 32% of their monthly cloud spend.

"The key challenge with cloud waste is that many organizations simply don't have a full grasp on all of the assets they are running in the cloud and what they are being used for, let alone what they are paying for them," said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security. "With our SideScanning technology, we understand an organization's cloud footprint better than anyone -- it's what enables us to secure the cloud for organizations around the world. We decided to further apply our existing intelligence to identify and eliminate unnecessary or underutilized cloud resources and infrastructure to optimize cloud costs for businesses while at the same time reducing their attack surface."

Orca's Cloud Cost Optimization capabilities solve cloud waste challenges for organizations by continuously aggregating relevant alerts about unnecessary cloud infrastructure spending for all supported public cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud (GCP), and Alibaba Cloud. The Orca platform groups Cost Optimization alerts into categories based on the cloud infrastructure that is associated with the excessive spend, like virtual machines (VMs), databases, keys, and load balancers, making deallocation quick and easy for organizations.

Even though stopped VMs on AWS and Google Cloud (and deallocated VMs on Azure), don't incur charges, what many organizations don't realize is that they are still being charged for any resources attached to the stopped/deallocated VMs until they are deleted. Orca helps organizations identify resources attached to stopped or deallocated VMs to prevent incurring unwanted charges, such as Elastic IP addresses and EBS volumes on AWS, OS and data storage disks on Azure, and persistent disks and external IP addresses on GCP.