Orca Security Acquires Opus to Gain AI Agent Orchestration Technology
Orca Security this week revealed it has acquired Opus to gain access to technologies capable of orchestrating artificial intelligence (AI) agents that are trained to automate a range of cybersecurity tasks.
Opus previously has been employing that core capability to drive a vulnerability management platform that Orca Security now plans to sunset.
Orca Security CEO Gil Geron said instead the AI agent orchestration technologies developed by Opus will be embedded with the cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) the company provides.
Ultimately, the ability to orchestrate AI agents that are performing routine tasks on behalf of cybersecurity teams will prove to be a game-changer, said Geron.
In addition to eliminating much of the drudgery that conspires to often burn cybersecurity professionals out, AI agents will go a long way toward closing the cybersecurity skills shortage that has long plagued organizations, he added.
Reducing the amount of toil coupled with the reasoning capabilities that AI agents will be able to invoke will help level what is currently a decidedly lopsided cybersecurity playing field, noted Geron. Most existing cybersecurity teams are already chronically understaffed, he noted.
Additionally, cybersecurity teams will find that AI agents will soon make it much easier to collaborate with, for example, DevOps teams to remediate application and infrastructure vulnerabilities, said Geron.
Less clear, is to what degree AI agents might also accelerate a broader push toward consolidation. Organizations continue to invest heavily in cybersecurity, but long term there is a trend toward adopting platforms that promise to eliminate the need for many of the bespoke cybersecurity tools that are regularly employed today. The overall goal is to make it simpler for cybersecurity teams to identify and respond to cybersecurity threats in a way that reduces the total cost of cybersecurity.
Those platform consolidation initiatives should also provide the added benefit of being able to more easily train AI models using data that is easier to collect and normalize.
It’s not clear just how widespread adoption of AI there is among cybersecurity teams, but it’s rapidly becoming apparent many cybersecurity teams will not be able to succeed without it. Adversaries are already investing heavily in AI to launch more sophisticated attacks at levels of unprecedented scale. The only way cybersecurity teams will be able to keep pace is to essentially fight AI fire with AI fire.
AI will replace the need for cybersecurity professionals any time soon, but the nature of those roles within organizations will undoubtedly change, hopefully, for the better. Cybersecurity teams today are perennially locked in a race against time to either prevent the next breach or fix the issue that led to a recent breach. The faster cybersecurity teams are able to identify the root cause of an issue, the less damage there will be inflicted.
In the meantime, cybersecurity teams should be creating an inventory of tasks that might soon be assigned to an AI agent that never gets tired, bored or sick. Everything else, they are likely to soon discover, is that actual part of the job they actually enjoy doing.
