Oracle Corp. has made available today two cloud storage tools that are intended to better minimize the risk of data breaches caused by human inaccuracy. The new services, Oracle Cloud Guard and Maximum-Security Areas are designed to make cloud security management simpler. They integrate with the company’s ambition to automate many of its cloud capabilities.
Oracle Cloud Guard is a cloud protection posture monitoring dashboard integrated directly into the Oracle Cloud console. It serves as a log and event aggregator for all of Oracle Cloud’s big infrastructure resources, including processing, networking, and storage, and controls installations and events regularly to detect any risks.
Customers can also assess the overall security of Oracle’s software-as-a-service and cloud database services they use. If it detects something wrong, it may try to remediate the risks immediately.
Full Protection Zones is a program that requires users to back up data with pre-configured security protocols that cannot be modified for any reason. The aim is to help companies defend themselves from data breaches caused by human-made cloud design errors. The service has rather strict requirements, while Oracle can provide less rigid security zones in the future.
Oracle has highlighted most of the features stating that the service provides policies for many key resources of Oracle Cloud Computing, including Object Storage, Networking, Security, DBaaS, and File Storage.
Oracle cites an analysis by Gartner Inc. which states that the expanded usage of the public cloud by businesses has resulted in new “blind spots” that have led to more than 200 data breaches over the last two years, revealing more than 30 billion documents. Gartner says all of these vulnerabilities can be avoided, however, and estimates that by 2025, around 99 percent of all cloud security vulnerabilities will be the customer’s fault.
Oracle Cloud Guard and High-Security Areas are also accessible in all Oracle Cloud commercial areas, the company added. “As workloads move to the cloud, companies are searching for a provider of security technologies across the whole hardware/software stack,” said Jay Bretzmann, Program Director for cybersecurity Research at International Data Corp. Oracle’s new cloud storage services would help to automate and simplify the maintenance of increasingly critical applications with incredibly rigid storage and enforcement criteria that, until lately, only a few could think thought would ever move off-premises, he further added.
