Oracle is expanding the built-in security services and capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to help customers in Singapore protect their cloud applications and data against emerging threats.
Oracle is adding five new capabilities to its OCI security offering, including a new built-in and cloud-native firewall service and enhancements to Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Security Zones.
These innovations will further help ensure that organisations in Singapore can easily secure their cloud deployments and applications with simple, prescriptive, and integrated services that in most cases, do not require additional investment.
As organisations across industries, from financial services to retail, move mission-critical workloads to the cloud, they must defend against security vulnerabilities from inside and outside the firewall that are resulting in more breaches and exposed data.
For example, highlighting threats that originate from inside a company, Gartner estimates that “through 2023, at least 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.” To overcome this challenge, cloud users and administrators are now expected to know how cloud security services work, configure them correctly and maintain their cloud deployments.
According to Jay Bretzmann, security program director at IDC, organisations are confident critical applications and data can be safely hosted in a cloud environment as they are on-premises.
He argues that the question becomes one of best fit; OCI’s cloud infrastructure design and new security services are very purposeful and prescriptive based on the hindsight of other cloud options in the market and the complexities and lack of automation other providers’ customers encounter.
“Oracle has now made cloud security easy to consume and affordable for its customers,” he added.
New OCI capabilities
OCI Network Firewall: Provides centralized protection against cyberattacks across OCI with a new cloud-native, managed firewall service using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Next-Generation Firewall technology (NGFW).
The firewall provides security controls, threat prevention, and mitigation features, including custom URL filtering, intrusion prevention and detection (IDS/IPS), and TLS inspection for inbound, outbound and lateral traffic to customer workloads hosted on OCI.
Oracle Threat Intelligence Service: Aggregates threat intelligence data across different sources and manages this data to provide actionable guidance for threat detection and prevention in Oracle Cloud Guard and other OCI services.
Oracle Cloud Guard Threat Detector: Identifies misconfigured resources, insecure activity across tenants, and malicious threat activities. It provides security administrators with the visibility to triage and resolve cloud security issues.
Oracle Security Zones: With Cloud Guard customers can create custom security zone policy sets to prevent actions that could weaken a customer’s security posture. Security Zone policies can be applied to various cloud infrastructure types (e.g., network, compute, storage, database, etc.) to ensure cloud resources stay secure and prevent security misconfigurations. Users determine which policies are appropriate for their needs by defining custom security zone policy sets.
Oracle Cloud Guard Fusion Applications Detector: Oracle Cloud Guard now also monitor Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and provide customers with a consolidated view of IaaS and SaaS security policies.
Christopher G. Chelliah, senior vice president, technology & customer strategy, Japan & Asia Pacific at Oracle, says “Security in the cloud is always a joint responsibility between the provider and the customer and we urge customers to challenge their vendors about what they are doing to ensure they are constantly protected.”
He acknowledged that Oracle is aiming to “take on more of that responsibility, whether through these new innovations, our ground up zero trust model, clear separation and isolation of tenancies, always-on encryption, or solutions like cloud guard, where we have ML and AI looking at attacks and putting a shield up against them.”
