Oracle Corp. made two cloud security tools generally available today that are designed to help reduce the risk of data breaches caused by human error.

The new services, Oracle Cloud Guard and Maximum Security Zones, are meant to help make cloud security management easier. They align with the company’s ambition of automating many of its cloud capabilities.

Oracle Cloud Guard is a cloud security posture management dashboard that’s built directly into the Oracle Cloud console. It acts as a log and events aggregator for all of Oracle Cloud’s main infrastructure services, including compute, networking and storage, and monitors configurations and activities continuously to try and identify any threats.

It can also be used by customers to assess the overall security of the Oracle software-as-a-service and cloud database services they use. Should it find anything amiss, it will attempt to remediate those threats automatically.

Maximum Security Zones is a service that enables customers to safeguard data with pre-configured security policies that can’t be changed for any reason. The idea is to help organizations protect themselves against security breaches that result from cloud configuration errors caused by humans. The service provides very strict configurations, though Oracle will offer less stringent Security Zones in future.

The service includes policies for several core Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services, including Object Storage, Networking, Encryption, DBaaS and File Storage, Oracle said.

Oracle cites research from Gartner Inc. noting that enterprises’ increased use of the public cloud has resulted in new “blind spots”  that have contributed to more than 200 data breaches over the past two years, exposing more than 30 billion records. Gartner says many of these breaches are avoidable, though, and forecasts that through 2025, about 99% of all cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

Oracle Cloud Guard and Maximum Security Zones are being made available today in all Oracle Cloud commercial regions, the company said.

“As workloads transition to the cloud, organizations are looking for a supplier where security technology is designed-in throughout the complete hardware/software stack,” said Jay Bretzmann, program director for International Data Corp.’s cybersecurity research. “Oracle’s new cloud security services will help automate and simplify the management of increasingly critical applications with painfully stringent security and compliance requirements that, until lately, few imagined would ever migrate off-premises.”

Image: Oracle