Oracle's Security Gambit

Oracle is offering a range of holistic security solutions based on cloud

Oracle has seen a long journey for more than 4 decades. Over the years, the company has transformed itself into a complete enterprise cloud company. Not many people are aware that ‘Oracle’ was a codename for a security project by the Government of USA, and that’s when the company came up with a product that is meant for data storage. That is how Oracle came into being.

As digital has gained momentum and cloud has started to take center stage in our lives, security has become the key focus area for enterprises. Oracle offers a wide range of cloud solutions for companies of all sizes across the world. Cloud security solutions are a key focus for the company.

Akshay Aggarwal, Director, Solution Specialist, Oracle India

Oracle has been taking care of data security for a very long time. The company ensures that customers are using all available options to secure their database systems as it is extremely crucial to keep the data safe. Akshay Aggarwal, Director, Solution Specialist, Oracle India, tells us more about the India business.

“Since our customers are enterprises that operate across diversified infrastructure and technology platforms, the only thing that we suggest to them is to put in place all the data security measures sooner rather than later.”

With cloud computing gaining traction, a lot of enterprises have moved from on-premises to cloud. Oracle ensures that anything which is running on data centers is secured - as soon as data moves into the cloud, it gets immediately secured. Talking about Oracle’s security solution portfolio, Aggarwal says, “We offer a wide range of holistic security solutions, including Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and security monitoring analytics solutions. The function of a CASB is to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities within a cloud application.”

Data, the biggest asset of an organization needs special attention because any negligence on this front can backfire and land the company in serious trouble. In the data driven economy, enterprises need to plan for the data deluge and extract the most valuable insights quickly, to make better business decisions.

Oracle security solutions have the capability to immediately detect and flag any kind of suspicious activity, and based on alerts, the administrator can then stop and remediate the activity within no time. The company has recently launched security monitoring analytics solutions that comes with the potential to provide a bifunctional visibility -tracking both operational and security analytics. Technologies like NOC and SOC, which are also on-premises data solutions, provide visibility of how an organization’s systems are running and alert the customers of any vulnerabilities coming out of the system.

“Our objective is to provide our customers complete visibility on any vulnerabilities happening anywhere and enable them to identify and mitigate the threat in no time. We try to do this using a single identity across on-premises and cloud. Oracle has always been a frontrunner and leader in the identity governance space for a long time now. So, we brought in the new concept of Identity SOC to the forefront. We’re seeing increased demand from India, and many customers have already started to use this solution.” says Aggarwal.

Oracle Universal Credits

Oracle Universal Credits offers customers the flexibility and choice for a cloud economy. The solutions are consumed as services and your investment gets billed on a reducing basis. “We call them credits. Services can be used as per requirement and you get the flexibility to stop one and start another in no time, without worrying about the payment multiple times. We even offer Pay-as-you-go model, which is like a monthly credit system. So, you can choose a particular solution for a month and try it out and see whether it works for you or not. If you want to continue or use more, you will go forward and purchase it as necessary. The technology availability landscape is changing, and our customers are benefitting immensely with such initiatives from Oracle.”

Challenges

With ransomware and similar attacks on the rise, we realize that if the security approach is completely human led, it would not suffice beyond a point and is bound to fail. But, ideally, there should be a system which is based on AI and Machine Learning and which can transform the way we have been looking at security.

According to Aggarwal, this is a dicey situation; because on one hand, machines are powering most cyber-attacks and on the other hand, there is a human being sitting in the data center and trying to figure out the cause/source. This is the challenge enterprises are facing, and Oracle is helping enterprises address it.

“We offer Security Risk Assessment to our customers that enable them to know their current security needs and collaborate with them to put a robust roadmap in place.”

Key Trends

Security management will move to the cloud

“You don't have to worry because our security solution is a unified system that uses machine language and artificial intelligence, does pattern recognition from different customer instances across the globe. One benefit of the cloud is that you get a lot of intelligence from different deployment services. It also helps to identify the various threat landscapes that customers are exposed to and makes it easy for us to come up with security patterns and apply the same to customer scenarios.”

Enterprises moving Security to the cloud

“One aspect is the availability of enterprise-grade technology at a price that you could never imagine before; the second aspect is security. The key trend now is enterprises are moving security to the cloud which is good for customers because they do not have to invest money in building up a system which could get obsolete before long, and is incapable to renew itself for new and future risks.”

Hybrid is here to stay

The market is getting bigger and better at the same time. A hybrid approach to security is especially gaining wide acceptance among large enterprises who have already invested in on-premises solutions. Hybrid security solutions secure all your on-premises assets including both private and public cloud.

“The need of the hour is a hybrid security solution that will take care of your on-premises and cloud applications. In case of a private cloud, Security Monitoring Analytics comes in handy as it can take feeds from on-premises systems and provide complete visibility. Hybrid is here to stay.”

Government is pushing Security

Another key trend is the increasing focus on security by the Government sector, which is bringing in a lot of regulatory policies. So, the increasing focus at large is on cloud security.

Oracle is heavily investing to enlarge the security portfolio

The company recently announced its decision to acquire Zenedge, a hybrid security startup which will provide security solutions with Oracle cloud. According to a statement from the press release, “Oracle plans to continue investing in Zenedge and Oracle’s cloud infrastructure services. We expect this will include more functionality and capabilities at a quicker pace.”

Clearly, security is something Oracle is focusing on in a big way to help enterprises in their cloud journey.