Two cloud security unicorns — Aqua Security and Orca Security — recently announced a partnership to integrate their runtime protection and visibility capabilities. Their CEOs emphasized that this collaboration will enable them to better compete with industry giants like Palo Alto Networks, while showcasing a superior alternative to the acquisition-driven model.

The definition of cloud security has been expanding, with more capabilities and problems to solve included under this umbrella, and deeper and clearer use cases, Aqua Security co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff told SDxCentral.

“The reality is that most customers already buy multiple vendors to solve the issue of cloud security.” This prompts Aqua and Orca to join forces and streamline this process for their joint customers, he added.

The collaboration was also driven by the complementary nature of their solutions, Davidoff said. He added that the cloud security market has evolved from the original agent-based approach to incorporate both agent-based and agentless approaches to address a broader range of security challenges. As a result, he expects to see more partnerships emerging in this market.

Orca Security co-founder and CEO Gil Geron echoed that the partnership combines best-of-breed capabilities from the two companies with a unified experience. “What we created is bidirectional integration. So it means that when you install the joint solution, your experiences is one platform, it's not multiple solutions.”

The partnership is designed to enable joint customers to get Orca’s agentless-first approach that provides multicloud visibility and continuous security spanning cloud infrastructure, workloads, data and identities, along with Aqua’s agent-based multicloud and hybrid-cloud runtime protection solution for cloud-native workloads.

The integration offers the following enhancements:

• Multicloud visibility: Users can access both Aqua and Orca data in one place.
• Real-time protection: Aqua’s runtime protection monitors and defends workloads in real time, with alerts pushed to the Orca platform as they happen.
• Risk prioritization: Using enriched data and context from Aqua’s runtime, users can understand the most significant threats to their cloud environment.
• Drift Prevention: Aqua ensures immutability and the capability to surgically block malicious malware across cloud native workloads using real-time behavioral detection.

The cloud security market is fiercely competitive. Gartner named 27 representatives in its market guide for cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) report last year, including Aqua Security, Check Point, CrowdStrike, Lacework, Microsoft, Orca Security, Palo Alto Networks, Rapid7, Sysdig, Trend Micro, Wiz and Zscaler.

The recent success of Wiz, which raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation and is eyeing an IPO, underscores the market's potential. Other recent major moves include Fortinet buying Lacework, SentinelOne acquiring PingSafe and CrowdStrike grabbing Bionic.

“When we think about the partnership, the No.1 competitor that we see in my view is Palo Alto [Networks],” Davidoff said, adding the security giant’s strategy of acquiring a dozen different companies to create a one-stop-shop platform is “not working effectively.”

He added that Palo Alto Networks’ capabilities achieved through acquisitions are not as deep, mature, or advanced as the specialized solutions offered by Aqua and Orca.

Geron also highlighted the pitfalls of the acquisition-driven model. “I think we've all seen the play of doing multiple acquisitions, and trying to Frankenstein your way into one product, and what it does to the actual value.”

“When the entire market is talking about platformization, we've seen what platformization using acquisition does to a product and it's not that well,” he added.

“The combination of Orca and Aqua is exactly the opposite. We're taking the best in both worlds and bringing the customer together as a trusted partnership,” Davidoff said.