“People are getting better at stealing data. We need to get better at protecting it.”

There was a very simple message at the opening keynote at Oracle Open World on Sunday: software automation is an essential means to secure data. The entire keynote was about the most recent advances in Oracle’s database technology, most notably that it is now ‘autonomous’, meaning it manages, tunes and patches itself without the need for human intervention. The message was linked closely to Tuesday’s keynote that will address cyber security. As most of the world’s worst data breaches happened after security patch was made available for the breached system, it reasonable to assume that the delay in installing the patch is a likely source of the problem. In other words, the vulnerability of the breached system or database is often caused by a human not installing, or incorrectly installing a patch.

On Sunday at Open World Larry Ellison announced the world’s first autonomous DB, which will do all its own patching, tuning and maintenance. This means much more than just ease of data management. By removing the human intervention in the database management process, and so removing the likely delay in that human taking some corrective action against – for example, a security breach, the database is immediately more secure. This new database can patch itself, in real time, while still running, removing the risk without any disruption to the users. Larry Ellison said that “…this is the most important that thing that we’ve done in a very, very long time.” This statement is in the context of all the other important things that Oracle has been doing recently. Not only is Oracle reducing the risk of running the database, it is also reducing the cost. Oracle is guaranteeing, contractually, in writing, to cut customers’ Amazon bill in half if they move their Oracle Database from AWS to Oracle Cloud. Not only that, Oracle will guarantee up to 99.995% uptime. That is only 30 minutes of downtime per year.  The first autonomous database to be released will be the Data Warehouse Cloud Service that will be available in December. This will be followed by the OLTP version in June 2018, and NoSQL and Express versions available later next year.

Whereas some skeptics could look at these announcements and see just corporate posturing by the IT mega vendors, there are three very important points to note about this announcement:

1. An Oracle Database is becoming the safest place to store data. This database will use machine learning to detect an impending security threat and automatically protect itself in real time with no user disruption. Who doesn’t want that?
2. There was a time that this level of technical capability would come with a very tasty price tag. Customers will be able to run the Autonomous Database Warehouse Cloud Service with all this capability from just $300 per month. As Larry Ellison said, customers “must be willing to pay less” than AWS for this functionality.
3. Finally, Oracle is removing the complexity from managing data. By automating the day-to-day maintenance of the database, DBAs and admins time is freed up to deliver more value-added activities such as DB design and other innovation.

A real cloud service should reduce complexity and reduce costs; it’s that simple. Many PaaS cloud services out there are really just software running on IaaS, and that’s just fine for those who need to be able to manage it all manually. But for those who need to just consume a pure database service and have it manage itself, then Oracle has just moved the goalposts in the cloud market. Not only is data management easier and cheaper on Oracle Cloud, it has just became more secure too.

In wrapping up his keynote, Larry Ellison said “People are getting better at stealing data. We need to get better at protecting it.” With this announcement, Oracle is helping its customers do exactly that, it their own data centres, or in Oracle Cloud.