Alan Zeichick, Oracle BRANDVOICE contributor, wrote in Forbes about how Cloud provides both maximum flexibility and security.

Oracle added 12 new data center regions that are offering its Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure during the past year, and the company plans to increase the pace. Clay Magouryrk, Senior Vice President of Software Development for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, spoke at Oracle OpenWorld 2019 and said that Oracle will have 36 regions by the end of next year.

One of the benefits of Oracle’s growing number of Cloud regions is that getting Cloud workloads physically closer to a customer lowers the latency, and having more than one data center in a country lets an organization keep data backups in the same country as the operating workload.

How Cloud Provides Both Maximum Flexibility and Security

How Cloud Provides Maximum Flexibility

Oracle Cloud provides flexibility through both flexible partnerships and flexible configurations that are changeable on the fly.

Flexible Partnerships

Flexibility means supporting multi-cloud workloads, such as those that are split between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In June, Oracle announced an agreement to connect Oracle and Azure Cloud data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, with a high-speed link – allowing a company to, say, run an application in Azure that draws on Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud. Oracle and Microsoft have expanded this relationship to include data centers in the London region, and next, they plan a third connection of data centers in the western United States.

The connection between Oracle Cloud and Azure is fast – with a typical latency of only 1.2 milliseconds between the two Cloud data centers in Virginia. The connection also provides interoperability. Organizations can share security credentials and identity postures across both Clouds – making it easier to treat a multi-Cloud application as a single application. As a practical matter, Microsoft and Oracle have a shared support model. Magouyrk explained that if customers are having problems with their Internet connectivity, or if they have a problem with the shared identity system, you can call either Microsoft or Oracle. Both are happy to help.

VMware and Oracle also announced a critical new partnership at OpenWorld 2019 – letting IT organizations run VMware workloads directly on Oracle Cloud without modifications.

Flexible Configurations

If you’re running an application that is using four cores, and it’s not fast enough, wouldn’t it be nice to push a button and suddenly have fire cores? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure plans to deliver that kind of flexibility in the coming year, according to Magouyrk, in a major departure from how Cloud infrastructure has been delivered across the industry. Cloud infrastructure has typically been offered in predefined configuration shapes for CPUs, GPUs, memory, or storage, which means that in order to get what you need, you might have to buy more than you want.

Services from other Cloud providers aren’t truly elastic either, Magouyrk said, since making a configuration change usually requires stopping services and applications, reconfiguring the server or infrastructure, and then restarting. This might require 5-10 minutes of downtime. In Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud, including technologies such as its Autonomous Database, the system can be set to the levels required and reconfigured without stopping the workload.

That’s also true for storage.

“We don’t believe you should have to pick between one of five or six volume types upfront and decide if you want storage on a hard drive or a solid-state drive. Or, if you want an SSD, you have to guess how many IOPS you need upfront.”

-Clay Magouyrk, Senior Vice President of Software Development for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Instead, IT staff should be able to dynamically change a system’s processor and storage performance level and even resize the capacity of storage volumes, without stopping applications.

How Cloud Provides Maximum Security

Security measures are entirely meaningless if they can be easily bypassed – either intentionally or through human error.

You may want to consider a new concept called Oracle Cloud Guard, which will continuously collect log data from every part of Oracle Cloud – including infrastructure and application stack. Oracle Cloud Guard uses machine learning that is designed to detect anomalous activity, and when possible, automatically take countermeasures. That might include shutting down a malicious application instance, a potentially corrupted service, or revoking user permissions if it suspects that a user has been hacked. It will be built into every layer of the Oracle Cloud – from networking to the operating system management.

“The system actively controls your security posture because humans just cannot react fast enough, and humans are not smart enough to twiddle 5,000 separate knobs to adjust security settings in real-time.”

-Clay Magouyrk, Senior Vice President of Software Development for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Another planned security offering is Maximum Security Zones, where security will be mandatory and always on. If an organization chooses that zone, security policies are locked down to prevent configuration changes, such as those caused by malware or human error. When new security capabilities come online from Oracle, those capabilities are automatically active as well.

For example, a policy might be that an object storage bucket only will store data that is encrypted, and if an application tries to upload unencrypted data, that transaction will be blocked, and Oracle will notify a security administrator. Or, maximum security policies might prevent data from being exported directly onto the internet, or exported faster than a prespecified rate, or taken outside of the country.

Conclusion

Flexibility and security are capabilities that only a Cloud provider can offer because that type of security and flexibility has to work at every level of the stack. Magouryk explains that “those capabilities have to be built deep into the actual infrastructure, as well as all those layers on top.” That is what Oracle believes customers will find in Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud.