Advanced Oracle Cloud revealed with autonomous capabilities, improved security

Larry Ellison, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of global Cloud major Oracle, on Monday unveiled the second generation Oracle Cloud with autonomous capabilities, improved security and upgrades for enterprises.

"The design goal of Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud is one secure platform to run everything," Ellison said at the company's annual user conference "Oracle Open World 2018" here, while taking a dig at rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) over Cloud security.

Making the announcement at the opening keynote, Ellison shared his vision for a second generation Cloud that is purpose-built for the enterprise and more technologically advanced and secure than any other Cloud in the market.

"We've built a Gen 2 Cloud. It's easy to say, very hard to do, to build a secure Cloud. It required a fundamental re-architecture of our Cloud.

"We've used a lot of the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies to find threats. You're not fighting with both hands tied behind your back anymore," Ellison said.

Oracle Cloud offers Software as a Service (SaaS) application suites for enterprise resource planning (ERP), database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centres.

"Our goal has always been as we move from one generation of computing to the next, to protect your investment in data and applications and make it easy to lift and move that into the next generation. We did that with Gen 2 Cloud," he said.

Oracle Gen 2 Cloud is built to run "Oracle Autonomous Database", which is the industry's first and only self-driving database.

The Oracle Autonomous Database, according to Ellison, now has the capability to automatically scan for security threats and apply security updates while running to help prevent cyber attacks and data theft.

Highlighting that moving to Oracle Cloud would cut database costs, he said: "We don't charge you a lot of money for moving data back and forth, in and out of our Cloud. Amazon charges you a fortune for moving data out of your Cloud. It's almost free to move it into your Cloud. They charge you 100 times more to move it out of your Cloud."

During a short demonstration, Ellison also shared benchmark test results that highlighted the performance gap between Oracle and its rival Amazon.

According to Ellison, Amazon runs its "AWS Cloud control code" on the same machines as it stores corporate data.

"The problem with Amazon's approach is a fundamental problem with the architecture of the Cloud. We'll never put our Cloud control code on the same computer that has a customer code," he noted.

(Krishna SinhaChaudhury is attending Oracle Open World 2018 at the invitation of Oracle. She can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in)

(With inputs from agencies.)