Exploring Cortex Cloud Security Innovations with Orion Cassetto | Black Hat 2025

Hey everyone. We're back here at Black Hat on the show floor. If you can't tell from the lights and the noise, it's live.

Uh, people are all over. But we carved out some room here at the Palo Alto, uh, exhibit, if we could call it that booth. If you want.

Let me introduce you to Orion Ca. Caseta Cato. Cato.

Yep. I apologize, Orion. It's all good.

I did get Orion right, though. You got the important part, like the star. But, um, Orion, thanks for joining us here on Techstrong tv.

Say hello to our audience. Give him a little bit about you. Yeah.

Um, my name's Orion Cato. I'm senior Director of Product marketing for the Cortex Cloud Solutions of Palo Alto Networks. Um, I've been kicking around the cybersecurity space for about 20 years.

About a third of my career is in application security, a third in security operations, and a third in cloud security. It's a nice, it's a nice third third, a third kind of rounded out thing. Um, Orion look, our audience knows Palo Alto.

Yep. But you know, this isn't like your grandma's Palo Alto. It's, it's more than just next Gen firewall.

Obviously you mentioned Cortex Cloud. Yep. That's the cloud security offering.

There's Unit 42, the, uh, the, uh, security research. Yep. Division.

You guys have done a couple of acquisitions recently. Some bigger than others. They're not all closed yet, but you can follow along on Security Boulevard to get all the news on that.

Uh, what have I left out? Uh, the thing we're talking about today is Cortex Cloud, which you talked about a minute ago. Um, what Cortex Cloud is, is essentially a re-architecture of our Prisma Cloud solutions, which is our cloud security, uh, portfolio.

What we essentially did was we took, you know, our well-known market leading solutions, Prisma Cloud, we re-architected them on top of our security operations platform, which is Cortex. That's how we got to Cortex Cloud. The benefit though, is essentially we now have, you know, our application security, our cloud posture security, our cloud runtime security solutions, all on the same unified data layer layer as our security operations solution.

So they have, you know, context running all the way from code to cloud, and then a unified policy and AI engine and, uh, automation engine of cortex. I love it. Um, look, you, you shoved a lot there in a little bit of time.

I Did. I hope that can, uh, you know, distill it Well. We're not gonna play it any slower because that's not gonna help.

But let's peel the leg the onion back a couple little, let's dive into each of these days. Sure. So the problem in the cloud security market essentially is fragmentation and the natural silos that exist within the platform.

So cloud security essentially is, um, three things. It's your application security, so the app, the applications you build, there's a whole bunch of six or seven tools that everybody has to have to make that work. Then you have your cloud posture security, which is essentially kind of a, a proactive battening down of the hatches and making sure your misconfigurations are dealt with.

And then finally you have your runtime security. So, you know, finding a attacks in real time reacting to those. And so what Cortex Cloud is, is essentially taking the, you know, 16 or so solutions that an average company would have to build these together and then putting 'em onto one platform to break down the silos of those tools and the silos of the teams that run those, which is application security, uh, your, uh, cloud security team, and then your security operations team all on one platform.

I love it. I love it. Look, the theme of this year's show is definitely, uh, ai.

Yeah. And I know you guys are doing stuff with AI within Cortex. Talk to us about that a little bit.

Yeah, I think it really has, um, two implications on, has two implications on our, uh, portfolio. The first is people don't often think about this, but when you're building an AI application, it's actually a cloud native application underneath it. So the more AI you use, the more cloud you use, and our solutions help you to secure that cloud.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, the proliferation of AI is starting to reach all sorts of areas, and one that's very important is AI generated code. So about 95% of code will be AI generated by 2030 according to Microsoft Report.

Um, what that means though is, you know, we have a lot of code being generated by ai and a lot of that is vulnerable and being pushed into production to the point that around 74% of cloud breaches are now due to insecure go. So really drives home the need for not only greater cloud security, but also, you know, an integrated approach that brings application security into that. I love it.

Very cool. Um, let's talk black hat. Yeah.

What are you hearing from people? What's been the reception for what's happening with Cortex and PA Alto on a broader stage? Yeah, it's a great show this year.

Um, there's a lot of buzz in the air. So we announced our application Security Posture Management, our A STM features. Yep, yep.

Um, it's been very, very well received. Um, you know, at least for this booth, it's one of the hot topics. I, I think A SPM is pretty hot all around.

What about, I know you're not part of, but unit 42 news there? Uh, yeah. We recently released the, uh, I think the 2025 global IR reports.

Um, so, you know, there are lots of good tidbits in that, lots of good research. The unit 42 guys are always cooking up amazing stuff. It's A good, it's a talented team they got over there.

Absolutely. Absolutely. How can people engage with Cortex Orion?

Yeah. Um, the best way to get involved, uh, the best way to get involved is to, uh, check out our website. So both the Cortex Solutions and the Cortex Cloud solutions.

com. Um, we also have live interactive demos that you can, you can do for the products and, uh, you know, kick the tires. Fantastic.

Hey, I, I know we, we took over the, uh, the theater here. Yeah. We gotta give it back.

But I want to thank you for coming on and getting us a little bit educated on Cortex. Of course. It's Palo Alto.

com or Palo Alto network? Al networks com. ComCom.

And then they could click through to Cortex from there. Yep. Alright.

Or Ryan, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of Black Hack. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. Cortex Cloud from Palo Alto Networks here at Black Hat. We are well, we're not live, we're edited, but we hope you've enjoyed this.

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