Oracle Cloud Security for Business Workflows of the ‘New Normal’
The abrupt ramping up of cloud security obligations following the need for rapid modernization, chasing businesses out of their ‘sluggish’ comfort zones is not entirely Covid-19’s fault. It is rather attributable to the businesses’ failure to proactively adopt the due agility and resilience before the pandemic struck.
Anyhow, to meet the needs of the ‘new normal’, the global economy has now shifted to remote work, and is continuously expanding for the new workforce demands. However, in most cases either a plenty of technical debt is registered, or a long-term investment on technology minus the skills/innovation for its security and maintenance is seen.
Particularly, with the crucial increase in the use of cloud applications and the public cloud, attackers are also gaining more prospects on targeting organizations. According to a study published by Oracle, 40% of enterprises have experienced cyber frauds within the last 2 years. In the same study, the respondents stated a 47% surge in cybersecurity attacks, including new malwares, exploits, and phishing attacks. [1] For instance, ransomwares capable of maliciously encoding the backups in the cloud, on top of infecting the local/source files, often end up in attackers extorting millions of dollars from the victims [2]. Or, perhaps the popular ill-configuration in cloud — of giving users more than the required privileges — resulting in colossal fraud events.
Hence, a rapid and decentralized adoption of cloud services such as the one induced by the pandemic, must accompany increased precautions on compliance and cyber health. This may include the vetting of all the applications (on-prem, and on cloud), the file sharing services, and even the collaboration platforms, for any inadequate configuration, or unsupervised access. And, equally essential is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) complementing all the dimensions of an organization’s cybersecurity posture besides offering the added strategic benefits, availability, and preventing breach.
Cloud Security for Applications, Databases, and Infrastructure
Although, effectively dealing with the threats and the necessary compliance is paramount for any business, it is not considered viable at the cost of the primary business operations. And, only Oracle understands the need to keep their customers free from the security concerns as comprehensively as possible. Hence, Oracle comes pre-equipped with all the necessary tools and automation required for their transformation products and services to be ‘autonomous’ in all respects, including security. Let us explore, below.
Oracle’s Security in their Software as a Service (SaaS)
The entire range of Oracle SaaS solutions afford enterprises the value propositions of a modern cloud suite, in terms of agility, security, and completeness. And yet, the Oracle SaaS solutions do not entail the huge expenses of management and upgrading as is required with a physical on-prem solution.
- Zero-Trust Strategy with IDCS and IDaaS
Starting with the Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS), it helps manage user access and privileges across all the cloud and on-premises applications/services leveraging a cloud-only, identity as a service (IDaaS) platform. This can be readily used by enterprises for enabling a zero-trust strategy (which is featured configuration where every user, device, workload, and network is not inherently trusted), and setting the user identity as an additional security perimeter.
- Oracle Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
This mechanism is built on machine learning to automatically identify threats across the top-to-bottom cloud stack. Enterprises also attain a clear visibility on applications for regulatory compliance, detecting anomalies, breach patterns, and frauds.
- Oracle Risk Management Cloud (RMC)
The Oracle’s RMC orchestrates cutting-edge security and transaction monitoring for reinforcing financial controls, guarantees separation of duties (SoD), firewall’s fraud, and streamlines the audit workflows.
Oracle’s Security in the form of Autonomous Databases
The Oracle Autonomous Database is known for assisting organizations in transforming their IT database operations via automatically patching, securing, updating, and managing itself while minimizing the risk arising from human error or unexpected downtime. This allows for an accelerated environment for innovation to take place for businesses, along with the optimized resource consumption.
- Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW)
Oracle’s ADW is a cloud-native database service optimized specifically for analytical processing. It automatically provisions compute and storage requirements and brings fastest query performance without the need for database administration.
- Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)
Oracle ATP is again a cloud database service, however, that streamlines database operations for Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) and real-time analytical applications. Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing cuts runtime outlays by up to 90% while achieving unparalleled performance, security, and scale via embedded machine learning-powered automations.
- Oracle Autonomous JSON Database
Oracle’s Autonomous JSON Database is a cloud-native document database service for simplifying the development of the JSON-centric applications, featuring serverless scaling, simple document APIS, high performance ACI transactions, comprehensive cloud security, and the affordable pay-per-use pricing.
Security on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) envisioning and ground up development is for addressing the modern-day requirements of the mission-critical applications, while affording developers and administrators with the equally modern development controls.
- Automated security updates
With the Oracle Autonomous Linux and OS Management in OCI, operating system security updates and patches are autonomously applied, translating to minimized complexity as well as human error, in return for increased in security and availability, while also cutting costs.
- Encryption, Monitoring, and Mitigation that are ‘Always-on’
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure utilizes a universal encryption program for encoding all the data across locations and times. In a nutshell, the data in OCI is always-on encrypted, at rest and during transit. Besides, it creates and enforces security policies for attaining a robust cloud security posture while remediating all the security inconsistencies.
- Customer data isolation
The OCI is built upon the Oracle’s security-first values. The architecture of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built to remove risks from advanced, sophisticated threats, and isolate enterprise data for ensuring data privacy and security 24/7.
For enterprises interested to explore cloud security further, can join Infolob’s webinar — set to go live on 10th June 2021. Here is the link for registration: xxx
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