Oracle Announces a New Secure Cloud at OpenWorld 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, Larry Ellison, presented the company’s next-generation cloud—featuring “a completely new hardware configuration” that promises an “impenetrable barrier” to secure data and robots to combat threats—at the OpenWorld 2018 conference on Monday. The company also announced three new offerings: CX Unity, Subscription Management, and a new SMB data solution for B2B marketers.
According to Ellison, the process of overhauling the cloud has resulted in two new technologies “that protect the cloud and protect our data”: a network of computers forming a barrier that blocks threats from getting in, and autonomous robots that “find those threats and kill them.”
“To re-architect the cloud I’m not talking about a few software changes here and a few software changes there; I’m talking about a completely new hardware configuration for the cloud. It starts with a foundation of the hardware—we had to add a new network of dedicated, independent computers to surround the perimeter of our cloud,” Ellison said. “These are computers you don’t find in other clouds—a whole new network of dedicated computers to form this impenetrable barrier. It not only protects the perimeter of our cloud and keeps threats from getting in, these barriers also surround each individual customer zone in our cloud so threats cannot spread from one customer area to another…a malicious customer can’t move laterally in our cloud and get at the data of other customers.”
The threat-killing robots, built from AI and machine learning, have been added to the autonomous robots that tune, back up, and recover the cloud’s database. Ellison noted that the threats most often faced by today’s systems involve attacks by bots, so it only makes sense to use bots to combat those threats.
“The way most people operate today, is if a vulnerability is found in your systems, human beings then decide ‘How do I schedule a downtime window—I need to take that system down and then patch it, and by the way I have to find all of the related systems’…It’s a bunch of people trying to defend your data against a robot or botnet attack. Who do you think is faster, who do you think is going to win?” Ellison said. “It’s got to be a case where this is completely automated, it’s autonomous. A database threat is discovered automatically, no human beings are involved, the patch is immediately applied while the database is running, no downtime window has to be found, you can patch the system while it’s still running. This is essential for protecting our data and protecting our cloud.”
The public generation-two cloud is available now, with the private version coming in 2019.
As for Oracle’s three new offerings, the first, CX Unity, is an approach to managing customer data that enables organizations to make customer interactions timely, relevant, and consistent. It brings together online, offline, and third-party customer data sources with the goal of creating a single, dynamic view of the customer. Additionally, it is pre-integrated with Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud with an eye on enabling intelligence to be applied across every customer touchpoint.
Subscription Management aims to enable organizations in any industry to adopt subscription business models through three key features. First, it features omnichannel support ensuring that renewal specialists, service agents, sales reps, and customers all have a consistent subscription experience. Second, it includes reporting tools that provide a full view of customer programs through a single view of key KPIs and analytics that optimize funnel conversion. And third, it has unified front- and back-office processes—including outbound communication, renewals, and charges—that provide insights into new deal activities, opportunities, and buying habits.
The new data solution enables account-based marketing (ABM) for sales outreach to contacts at small and midsize businesses. It has three key elements: self-service syndicated SMB audiences, custom SMB audience capabilities, and SMB digital channel marketing. First, marketers at businesses of all sizes can use Oracle Data Cloud’s data marketplace to build SMB audiences at scale and active those audiences across major platforms and the open web. Second, enterprise marketers can build custom SMB audiences by on-boarding their first-party data or CRM files and then using Oracle data to identify additional relevant contacts at the same companies. And third, marketers can use Oracle’s Data Management Platform (DMP), digital channel marketing capabilities, and custom SMB audiences to maximize returns on partner market development funds spent on joint SMB marketing campaigns.