Andy Ellis joins Orca Security as advisory CISO

Orca Security announced that Andy Ellis, famed cybersecurity leader, has joined the company as an advisory CISO. Ellis will harness his broad security expertise from product development to industry awareness building, and even supporting HR, leadership, and talent management to further catapult the rapidly growing cloud security innovator forward.

Ellis will leverage more than two decades of experience building and leading Akamai Technologies’ products and teams, while pioneering the CSO role through his deep security and risk management expertise, to support Orca Security’s continued growth, market education, and customer success. He will also pull from his background as an officer with the United States Air Force’s 609th Information Warfare Squadron and Electronic Systems Center to provide a unique CISO view across Orca Security’s teams.

“Andy’s advice has been instrumental to our success since the early days of Orca Security, when he immediately became excited about how our SideScanning technology would revolutionize the cloud security industry,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security. “We are thrilled to welcome Andy to the team and can’t wait to see what the future holds with him officially on board.”

Agentless public cloud security education

At Orca Security, Ellis will also serve as a public-facing thought leader, helping to provide industry education on CISO-level public cloud and other critical security topics. He will share his insights through a variety of mediums, including articles, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more.

Andy Ellis will also launch a new Orca Security podcast called Cloud Security Reinvented in the coming months, where he will interview security leaders about the insights they have drawn, both from cloud transformations and the longevity of their own careers.

In addition to these platforms, Ellis will hold private consultations with practitioners who are interested in discussing a specific topic or learning about how they can use Orca Security to gain 100 percent cloud security and compliance coverage for AWS, Azure, and GCP without agents or network scanners.

“I’ve been a fan of Orca Security since our first meeting a few years ago,” said Andy Ellis, advisory CISO of Orca Security. “I fully believe that Orca Security’s technology and approach will change the way we secure the cloud, and I am very happy to be a part of this team that will help create a safer world together.”

While being the advisory CISO at Orca Security will be Ellis’ primary role, he will also remain an operating partner at YL Ventures and be engaged in the startup ecosystem. In fact, YL Ventures facilitated the initial connection between Ellis and Orca Security, when having him review its technology for investment, and he has since built an ongoing relationship with the company through his venture advisor role at YL Ventures. His professional development company, Duha, is also still actively developing leadership skills training.