Oracle’s Larry Ellison has today declared that we are losing the cyber war, telling the OpenWorld audience to “make no mistake, it is a war.”
Driving home the catastrophic impact of an attack, the Oracle CTO and executive chairman highlighted the fallout from the recent Equifax data breach. Speaking of the 143 million American records stolen, the series of resignations across the Equifax board and the belief that it was the work of a nation state actor, Ellison said:
“Companies have to fend for themselves against nation states who are stealing their data and very sophisticated cyber criminals who are stealing their data. It is not an easy task to defend yourself from nation states.”
The cybersecurity industry has long been vocal of how automation is the future, with Larry Ellison joining the chorus of automation advocates by announcing that the cyber war could be won by pitting computer against computer, saying “it can’t be our people against their computers.”
Here, Ellison introduced Oracle’s automated cyber defence solution, which when paired with the newly announced self-driving database, offers what Oracle pitches as the world’s most trusted and secure cloud.
The new ‘highly automated’ Oracle Management and Security cloud works alongside the fully autonomous database, working together to protect against data. Announced as the “world’s first cloud-native system’ by Ellison, the Oracle Management and Security Cloud can monitor, analyse and manage all operational and security data in one system. Offering automated remediation in real-time, a unified entity model and out-of-the-box machine learning, Ellison pushed the importance of not needing to wait for down-time and the stamping out of human error in cybersecurity.
Underpinning the new offering is machine learning, with Ellison pointing out that machine learning by its very name learns through the ingestion of more and more data – data which Oracle has in abundance.
Ellison made clear that companies need to rethink their defence strategy, advocating the elevation of security as currently “we don’t take the security threat terribly seriously, very few people in our organisations take it seriously.”
Of course that rethink of strategy came with the hard sell for the new security cloud, but it is a compelling offer. Automation is the future of cybersecurity, with Oracle making a smart bet on ramping up its autonomous offerings and pairing the security cloud with the current star of the show, the self-driving fully autonomous database.
Going back to the Equifax data breach, Ellison again warned the audience that “no one wants to be on the front page, Equifax is a 100 year old company and they are fighting for survival.” Food for thought as Oracle introduces automated cybersecurity.
