Today, as Larry Ellison, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, began to deliver his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld 2015, he reviewed the evolution of Oracle’s SaaS to PaaS to IaaS path, which has been over a decade long in the making.

Ellison explained that Oracle is now delivering products on all three layers of the cloud and referred to Microsoft as the only competitor doing the same. He then moved his focus to the Oracle IaaS offerings while driving home the importance of security residing on this layer.

Zealous about security

To say that Ellison is passionate about security would be an understatement. He believes that the industry is improving. “We can do better. We need a next generation of cybersecurity,” he said. He described security as a “tech confrontation” between governments, companies and other nefarious parties.

He insisted that security needs to be at the lowest point of the stack as possible and described why application and database security holds risk. Ellison described, “Silicon security is belter than OS security. The best hackers cannot download changes to the microprocessor, and they cannot alter silicon. It’s really tricky.”

Removing the on-off switch

Ellison explained the reason behind Oracle’s choice to have “always-on security” as a necessity, citing, “There should be no way to turn off encryption, because when customers choose, it can be a bad idea.” He broke down why it is a bad idea by clarifying that whether it is due to performance or cost concerns, turning off security exposes a company to probable attacks.

Cyberbullies

There are a number of potential threats possible, and Ellison discussed in detail how they can occur. He broke down three areas where security breaches are dangerous. The first part is the stealing consumer information, which is usually a credit card or identity theft. The second problem is stealing of proprietary or high-level government information.

However, it is the third breach that causes the most concern, and that is security bugs or intruders into a system. Not only can these invaders read and steal data, but they also have the ability to change data. Ellison stated, “The industry is attacking the authentication part of the problem, but it is still not enough.

Advancing state-of-the-art

In order to protect Oracle customers, the company announced that it launched “always on security on silicon.” Using the Oracle M7 processor, Oracle will speed up encryption and decompression on the hardware running at memory speed so data remains encrypted all the time.

The product continually monitors with memory for violations and/or intrusions into the database. Additionally, with the high-speed encryption, optimal performance will remain intact and with SQL in silicon, the customer will have high-speed memory decompression and accelerated in-memory database functionality.

Silicon can save your data

Ellison is proud that Oracle is the first software company to be “making chips and pushing certain features down to silicon.” The Oracle M7 processor has software features in silicon. This feature provides silicon-secured memory that stops system threats in real time the moment it hits the data center.

“How do we do it?” he asked. “It’s deceptively simple.” Ellison educated the audience on how the Silicon Secured Memory assigns numbers to keys, and memory then logs the key with the number to make sure it matches when used. If there is a mismatch, the product flags the problem, in real time.

Speaking to cost concerns, Ellison noted, “Since you can’t replace all microprocessors if you have five percent, the features in the cloud still can detect the attack.”

The releases keep coming

Announcing more product releases, Ellison unveiled:

• Ksplice for Userspace, which makes the management of critical updates fast, easy and safe.
• Oracle Key Vault, which provides the user with key management and decryption keys for all data in Oracle cloud, and only the customer holds those keys on premises.
• Oracle Database Vault, which delivers separation of duties, enabling layers of authority as to who can see what data.
• Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, which monitors every action in the cloud. The product detects and stops threats, and helps with compliance reporting.

Ellison wrapped up the security product releases by saying, “We have end-to-end encryption.”

The Oracle Infrastructure

Oracle’s new Infrastructure as a Service suite is designed to do one main thing, offer the customer the same experience on-premises or in the cloud. All storage, compute and network components duplicate servers and give the enterprise the ability to point and click files from an on-prem server to the cloud.

Ellison closed out by thanking the Oracle engineers for all the time and effort put into making the three layer services a reality.

Stay tuned for the full video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

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