Oracle's Larry Ellison Unveils AI-Driven Security Solutions at CloudWorld '24

CloudWorld 24 - Larry Ellison wants to get rid of passwords and pitches Oracle AI-enabled systems for superior enterprise security

Larry Ellison's keynotes are always a useful insight into the short to medium term strategic vision for Oracle. The founder and CTO of the vendor is well known for his colorful delivery, but with the announcement of a new partnership with former rival AWS yesterday, there was no competition bashing in sight. Instead, what audience members at CloudWorld in Las Vegas were provided with was an enthusiastic outline of why Oracle sees AI as being critical to securing enterprise systems - and why passwords need to be a thing of the past. There were a number of areas of focus during Ellison's pitch, ranging from the need for autonomous databases, to using AI to generate safer code and applications, as well as the need to collect biometric data to authenticate people's identity: I'm going to talk about cloud security. Oracle can use AI to dramatically improve cloud security. I mean, improve it by a factor of 10, or a factor of 100, to do things that everyone wants us to do - like get rid of passwords. Passwords are a terrible idea. Passwords that are 17 characters long, including special characters that no one can ever remember and [are written] down, are unbelievably easy to steal. The cyber wars are getting worse, not better. We've got to find better ways to authenticate people than asking them to type in a password. The strategy Ellison outlined repeatedly pointed to the need to eliminate human error from enterprise systems, rather relying on AI and 'robots' to consistently and repeatedly check for vulnerabilities and carry out patches so that human fault could be taken out of the equation. Ellison started by talking about Oracle's autonomous systems, specifically the need for autonomous databases to keep data safe: How do we keep your data safe? Very simply, by using autonomous systems. Fully automated, self driving systems. Just like self-driving cars, which are much safer than human driving cars. The robot isn't going to go 130 miles an hour on the freeway. The robot is not going to have a few drinks after dinner and get in the car. We can save lots of lives with autonomous driving cars. We can do a better job of protecting our data if the database system that is managing that data is fully autonomous - and this is something that Oracle has been working on for a very long time. Ellison said that Oracle's autonomous databases use 'robot DBAs' to automate everything - so that humans don't configure the database. He gave an example of a large bank that was running an application in the cloud, but lost all of its customers' credit card data because the bank's programmers made a mistake configuring the database and left it vulnerable to the public internet. He said: Literally every single credit card user lost their credit card data. That cannot happen with the Oracle autonomous database, because human beings do not configure the system. Robots configure the system. It is fully self driving. It configures itself. It encrypts everything. It backs itself up if you have to recover from a backup, it does that fully automatically. There are no human beings involved in backup. There's no human beings involved in recovery. Your software automatically gets updated. If there's a security patch that's available, it automatically patches The catch, he said jokingly, is that you "have to be willing to pay less to use autonomous systems". Ellison said that it's not only the safest way to run your systems, but it's also the most economical - adding that he has decided that all of Oracle's applications have to be moved to Oracle autonomous databases: By 2025 we will have moved all of our applications to the autonomous database. We will be off the older databases. Everything must be autonomous, not to save money, but to keep the data safer. No human labor, no human error. The next item on the security agenda should be using AI to build new applications, so that, again, human error can be removed and AI can eliminate vulnerabilities. Ellison pointed to Oracle's low-code platform, APEX, as an effective method of generating applications - rather than writing code to do so. He said that more and more of Oracle's applications are generated using APEX: What are some of the advantages of using APEX? Everyone says, well, we get 10x productivity versus hand programming. Yeah, we do. We get huge productivity gains. But more importantly, again, is our security. When the application generator generates the code, we don't generate security vulnerabilities. A computer program is writing the code, it will not make that mistake. It will not generate a vulnerability that you have to fix later on, This should mean that applications are more reliable too, he said: They're more reliable because if a power line should be cut to your data center for whatever reason and you lose power, you can immediately fail over to a different computer in that data center, or in a different data center, because the application was generated and it was generated to be fully recovered. A stateless, fully recoverable application. So we generate more secure, more scalable, stateless, recoverable applications - and we get a 10 times productivity gain to go along with it. Ellison also argued that passwords need to become a thing of the past if enterprises really want to secure data and peoples' identities. Oracle believes that instead of getting people to remember long winded, complicated passwords, they should rely on biometric data and let systems know who you are that way: People can't imitate my fingerprint. They can't imitate my face. That's very hard to do. So type in who you are, and we'll automatically authenticate you from a biometric database in the cloud. It's that simple, we recognize you, we know who you are. He went as far as to say that passwords are a ridiculous idea, should be obsolete, and are actually very dangerous. Ellison pointed to those long passwords with multiple characters and numbers that no one can remember, so they write them down, they get stolen, and then sold on the dark web - where they can typically be used across multiple systems to access your information. Instead organizations should be using smartphones to recognize your face, he said, or your fingerprint - collecting this information in a biometric database. Presumably, Oracle's pitch is that its autonomous databases are secure and reliable enough to ensure the safety of peoples' biometric data. However, Ellison is not only talking the talk, but walking the walk, as he said that Oracle will soon be requiring its employees to get rid of passwords: By the way, a year from now you won't be able to log into Oracle. People who work at Oracle will not be able to log into the systems using passwords. They are just not secure. Therefore that option is going to be gone inside of Oracle. It becomes very difficult to impersonate somebody else, if you have proper user authentication. Finally, Ellison spoke about the difficulties in securing networks - and again said that AI and 'robots' should be utilized to do this more effectively. He explained that network security is "astoundingly complicated" because when you configure a network there are two competing goals. On the one hand there is a desire for speed, to make networks high performance, very reliable, with lots of pathways and lots of bandwidth. However, on the other hand you want to make sure that no-one on the network is moving data from point A to point B if they are not allowed to. Ellison said: Let's say you were trying to improve the performance of your network, you add ports or add routes - if you're not careful as you add ports and add routes and subnets, you you could accidentally be creating these security vulnerabilities. It happens all the time. It's why it's so difficult to get someone to change their network configuration, because there are so many security audits required before you change your network configuration. The slightest mistake, it can expose your data to the public Internet, expose your data to hackers. So the solution to the problem is you really have to separate network security from network configuration. Oracle's solution to this is what it calls ZPR (Zero Trust Pack Routing), which essentially utilizes AI to inspect the configurations of the network for you, so that you can just focus on performance. Ellison said: Worry about one thing. Worry about making it fast and reliable. Then let's build an all new system that's responsible for network security. That new system will authorize certain paths through the network for certain users to use certain services, will look at certain data, and only authorized paths are allowed. No other paths will be allowed. So it's a brand new network security system that is separate from network configuration - rather than blended with network configuration. What we actually do is we we have computers in our cloud that will look at every single packet that goes goes through the network and make sure it's an authorized - it's an authorized journey from point A to point B - and that means we've literally got these robots inspecting packets in our network. Billions of packets are being inspected every second. The system robot will automatically adapt. You can change your configuration, you can add ports, you can do all sorts of things. And ZPR will automatically regenerate new robots to make sure that your data is still protected. Suddenly you get a much simpler network configuration. There are none of these subnets. You don't have to worry about security. It's very true that security and data security is front of mind for enterprises at the moment - and this will become even more important as adoption of AI continues. Oracle knows that trust is critical to ensuring the effective use of data and Ellison clearly believes that we should be relying on systems to manage this for us, rather than people. Human error is very real and more often than not is the problem when things go wrong. Getting people to loosen their grip and hand over the reins to robots and AI to manage their data and systems is a challenge though - but it was a compelling pitch from Ellison.

Oracle's Ellison Promises Big Cyber Threat Reduction With Next-Generation Network, Data Security Offerings

In an Oracle CloudWorld keynote, the Oracle founder and CTO also held up the company's new alliance with Amazon Web Services as the start of the "open multi-cloud era." Oracle's next-generation network security technology, which leverages AI and biometric authentication to thwart cyber threats, is now available in the Oracle Cloud, Oracle founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison told Oracle CloudWorld attendees in a keynote speech Tuesday. Ellison's news of the availability of the Oracle Gen2 Cloud Network + ZPR software came during a broader segment of his keynote in which he described how AI technology is being used to improve data, application and network security and will change today's password-centric user identity security practices. Ellison also devoted part of his hour-plus keynote to touting the benefits of the new partnership with Amazon Web Services, unveiled Monday, through which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Oracle database and other technologies will be integrated with - and even embedded within - AWS systems. [Related: As Oracle Inks Partnerships With OpenAI, Google Cloud, CTO Ellison Says 'We Should Be Interconnected To Everybody'] "If we're going to do a really good job of defending our networks, defending our computer systems and stopping data theft, preventing identity theft, all of those things, we need to exploit the most advanced technologies to defend ourselves. And those advanced technologies are artificial intelligence," Ellison said. Oracle has been talking about its planned use of ZPR (zero trust packet routing), a new standard for network and data security, since Oracle CloudWorld in September 2023. Tuesday Ellison said the Oracle Gen2 Cloud Network + ZPR Software is now available as part of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The ZPR technology was developed by Applied Invention. Ellison explained that ZPR essentially separates network configuration from network security and uses autonomous robots to do packet inspection and authorize data paths across networks, allowing only permitted users to access specific services. The system also uses AI-driven code generation techniques in software to enforce ZPR rules while AI-based biometric user identity tools also play a role. Ellison predicted that biometric databases will also revolutionize identity security for everything from IT systems to credit cards and will eventually replace passwords. "The idea that we use passwords is a ridiculous idea. It's obsolete. It's very dangerous," he said. The Oracle founder added that starting about a year from now biometrics will replace the use of passwords within Oracle. "That option is going to be gone inside of Oracle," he said. Ellison said AI-based automated capabilities within the Oracle Autonomous Database will improve data security by "getting rid of human errors that allow people to steal your data." He said that in 2025 Oracle will require that all Oracle applications running on older versions of the company's database be moved to the Oracle Autonomous Database. And Ellison said AI-powered code generators in Oracle APEX, the company's low-code application development platform, improve application security by reducing the number of security vulnerabilities that are introduced into applications by human developers. "We don't generate security vulnerabilities," Ellison said of APEX. "You're more productive and you're more secure." "All of these AI technologies give us a chance to win the cyber wars," Ellison said. "If you're worried about cyber criminals and you think they pose a threat, wait till you look at the capabilities of nation states who can shut down utilities, entire utilities, in an unfriendly moment. We need to make sure that our digital systems, our digital infrastructure, is much more secure than it is today. And we have the technology to do it." Ellison devoted much of the first half of his keynote to talking up the new Oracle-AWS alliance and how it ushers in a new "open, multi-cloud era." The Oracle executive said the advent of cloud computing created islands of cloud platforms and cloud applications that did not work well together. But Ellison said the industry is "entering a new phase" in cloud computing. "Now, as we're well into the cloud era, we're entering a new phase where services on different clouds work gracefully together. The clouds are becoming open. They're no longer walled gardens. Customers will have choices and can use multiple clouds together," he said. Under the partnership with AWS Oracle technology, including Oracle OCI, the Oracle 23ai database and Oracle Exadata systems, will run within AWS data centers, starting late this year in an AWS facility in Virginia. That will allow customers' applications to tap into services from multiple clouds. AWS CEO Matt Garman joined Ellison on stage and talked up the benefits of the relationship. The CEO noted that many customers run workloads on the AWS platform because of its "security and scalability," but they also want to use their Oracle database and applications. He also saw the Oracle-AWS alliance as helping customers accelerate their move to cloud computing. "Customers are just super excited about being able to bring these together," Garman said. "It also speeds that migration. A lot of customers want to move to the cloud and the more we can make it easy for them to use the components and the applications that they love, and that they use as part of their operating environment, and make it easy to migrate those without having to change those out, the faster many of these customers can go on that modernization journey and get out of their own data centers." Earlier in the day Oracle CEO Safra Catz focused her keynote speech on highlighting some of the innovative ways a number of marquee customers are using Oracle's software and services, including the company's AI services. MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle joined Catz onstage and said his company is using AI to personalize and customize automated responses when people call to make resort reservations. "We are leaning more and more into AI taking on that responsibility," he said. Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare co-founder and COO, said her company is using AI capabilities within OCI to help efficiently connect clients across multi-cloud environments and best utilize the available services.