Every minute sees the exchange of 156 million emails, 16 million text messages, 2.5 million Googlesearches, and trillions of other data points created by the more than 3.7 billion humans currently using the internet. Ninety percent of the world’s total data was generated in the last two years, and that number is forecast to double each year as our social, professional and economic interactions become increasingly rooted in digital exchange.

Deriving value from this rapidly growing data stockpile is mission critical for businesses of every size, with benefits ranging from improvements in marketing to more secure, efficient paths to overall innovation.

To help customers reach their goals of streamlined data extraction and implementation, Oracle Corp. is combining its years of experience in data management with the powerful potential of machine learning tools in its new Autonomous Database, dubbed the “Tesla of databases” by one Oracle executive.

“We’ve been solving the hard problems for customers when it comes to data management, and one of the more important ways we can solve this is by automation,” said Monica Kumar (pictured), vice president of database and big data cloud product marketing at Oracle. “With this new deluge of data, who better than Oracle?”

With more than four decades of experience developing solutions in data and information, Oracle is building out the future of data management through new automated tools with Kumar at the helm.

Kumar spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Monica Kumar in our Women in Tech feature.

A dangerous data gap

Cloud integrations offer huge efficiency potential across industries, but the still-developing technology also presents challenges to businesses in both its novelty and scale. By 2020 there will be 50 billion devices actively collecting, analyzing and sharing data, and enterprises are finding increasing difficulty in extracting its value as its sheer mass outpaces the abilities of available talent.

“Every organization is trying to figure out how to make their businesses run better because of those insights, whether [to] create new revenue streams, optimize for efficiency, [or] deliver better customer services,” Kumar said.

Challenges aren’t limited to serving customers and maintaining a strong pace of innovation. An unwieldy influx of information is also creating security issues that compound with scale. “We are talking about massive security breaches happening in the industry, bad guys having access to sophisticated technologies to get access to core data. Security issues are multiplying and compounding,” she said.

With the 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs predicted to remain open by 2021, security threats will only become more difficult to address with human labor alone. Even where solutions are available, the current skills gap has left companies vulnerable.

“Of all the breaches that have happened, 85 percent actually had a fix available, and yet it wasn’t applied. Human beings are very busy,” Kumar said.

The first and only self-driving database

To prevent against risk and provide a path forward for data processing, Oracle is combining its extensive knowledge of enterprise data needs with the capabilities of machine learning to create a protected, productive ecosystem for businesses at every level of cloud migration.

“We’re moving to embed machine learning across our entire cloud portfolio, combining [it] with the decades of database optimizations we’ve been putting out in the industry. The power of that combination has culminated into Autonomous Database,” Kumar said.

The Autonomous Database is a self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing data ecosystem that extracts the highest amount of value possible from all incoming information using far fewer human resources. “Provisioning, upgrading, patching, tuning, monitoring, backing up — all of the functions that are very manual today — are all done by Autonomous Database itself,” she said.

The database is designed to support enterprises through both its autonomous data warehouse, an analytics processing hub, and autonomous transaction processing, a platform for developing and deploying applications and high-performance, mission-critical workloads in the cloud. The Autonomous Database is also available on-premises for enterprises working in a hybrid capacity.

“It’s the first and only self-driving database in the industry,” Kumar stated.

Enabling a data-powered future

By automating away the tedious manual tasks that can weigh down productivity and increase risks of error, the Autonomous Database is already reducing business costs and promoting innovation, as well as preventing against threats and shareholder value loss. The tool can currently reduce time spent on administrative work by 80 percent, according to Kumar.

“Today we offer with Autonomous 99.995 percent uptime, which means 2.5 minutes of downtime or less per month. That’s real, hard savings for the customer that they can put into something else more strategic,” she said.

Customers currently working with the new tool have seen massive efficiency improvements. One business saw decreases in provisioning time from two weeks to eight minutes, and another cut querying times from 20 minutes to just a few seconds, according to Kumar.

“They can now roll out projects faster and improve customer services. That means they can grow their business, provision more customers, [and] current customers can be happier because they are supporting them better and faster,” Kumar said.

The database is also improving security, providing preventive safeguards that are constantly updating to protect against evolving threats. With decades of experience supporting some of the largest federal and public sector organizations in the world, security is at the forefront of Oracle’s autonomous strategy.

“Not only can we predict a breach before it happens, we can actually fix it before it becomes an issue. Security is the first design principle of all our technology solutions,” Kumar stated.

While progress in artificial intelligence has long been plagued by concerns that the technology will irreparably disrupt the economy by replacing human labor, Oracle offers a counterpoint as its autonomous database gives workers the opportunity to redistribute talents toward greater innovation.

“They don’t have to be involved in manual drudgery. They can now offload all of that and focus on more strategic tasks. They can become a partner to the business,” Kumar said.

As businesses discover the new freedoms allowed by AI tools, Oracle is enabling the progression from ineffectual management to practical, innovative performance by re-skilling workers now aided by automated database tools.

“The fact that it would take them six months to deploy new projects and now they can do it within a few minutes is actually unbelievable to them. It’s like the Tesla of databases,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE