Tuxera announced that Orca Security, the cloud security innovation leader, has adopted Tuxera's file system implementation as part of their cutting-edge cloud security platform. Orca Security provides cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance across multiple cloud platforms. Microsoft NTFS by Tuxera was adopted by Orca Security for its sustained and consistently high performance and proven use in other enterprise storage applications.

Bringing visibility to security over multiple cloud servers

Orca Security provides workload-deep security - including VMs, containers, and serverless workloads - across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Orca Security's patent-pending SideScanning technology is the only cloud security solution that identifies security risks without the use of agents, scanners, or any code running in the customer's environment. Their platform brings complete visibility into the security of workloads and cloud configurations, detecting vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, and unsecured PII.

The company serves customers across a broad spectrum of industries including financial services, media and entertainment, CPG, manufacturing, cloud, mid-market, and enterprise customers across all geographic regions. Because their platform accesses data from multiple clients and multiple servers, rapid data handling and consistent performance are paramount in ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction. Additionally, any technologies integrated with the Orca Security platform must also have rigorous control over data integrity, thus ensuring data security.

High throughput essential in ensuring enterprise customer satisfaction

Initially, the Orca Security platform relied on an alternative NTFS file system implementation to read, mount, and create disk snapshots from NTFS volumes. For volumes created from snapshots, the storage blocks must be pulled down from the cloud provider and written to the volume before they are accessible. This preliminary action takes time and can cause a significant increase in the latency of I/O operations the first time each block is accessed. In fact, the first consecutive read operations performed on a block can be five to 10 times slower. The optimal volume performance is achieved after all blocks have been downloaded and written to the volume.

With their original NTFS file system implementation, Orca experienced poor performance. The company then turned to Tuxera for storage management expertise, aiming to get better performance.

"At Orca, we use cloud disk snapshots and provide forensic-level visibility inside of every virtual machine. Crawling and storage optimizations available in Microsoft NTFS by Tuxera provide the speed we need to deliver customers a complete view of their multi-cloud estate in minutes," says Gil Geron co-founder and chief product officer at Orca Security. "Tuxera's expertise in high-performing, fail-safe file systems and enterprise-grade storage software help us achieve a competitive edge in the market."

Tuxera's software enables optimal speeds for enterprise workloads 

Using Microsoft NTFS by Tuxera, the platform was able to achieve up to three times faster performance on average, solving the Orca Security platform speed-performance issues to AWS servers. "We're very excited to work with the innovation leader in cloud security. Orca Security has an outstanding reputation backed by numerous success stories," says Heinrich von Keler, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Tuxera. "Tuxera is proud to be integrated into such an innovative platform, ensuring the highest possible performance between the block level and cloud servers."

Multi-cloud enterprise services adoption rapidly growing

This customer case comes in context of the booming adoption of cloud services by businesses and enterprises around the globe. World-leading research company Gartner predicts that by 2024, 14.2% of global enterprise IT spending will be dedicated to cloud services. This trend is increasingly pointing towards adoption of a multi-cloud strategy. In Flexera's 2020 State of The Cloud Report, 93% of companies reported using a multi-cloud strategy. This trend is compounded by some of the challenges companies have in adopting cloud services, with some 66% of companies identifying security as the biggest challenge for cloud adoption.