Oracle CEO: Underground cloud security system ‘critical’ to Israel
A big announcement about Oracle’s underground cloud data center in Jerusalem is expected this week, the company’s CEO, Safra Catz, hinted on Tuesday at the annual Jerusalem Post Conference.
“We thought this was absolutely critical for the country, the country’s security, for the citizens of Israel, that we make that investment even before we signed up a single customer,” Catz said.
She added: “with more to come. I don’t want to steal Eran’s thunder later this week,” referring to Oracle Israel leader Eran Feigenbaum.
The company said in February that it would be the first global tech giant to open a cloud region in Israel, together with Bynet Data Communications.
A previous release by the company explained that the data center would extend over four floors and thousands of square meters 50 m. below ground. It intends to provide advanced cloud services to companies and government offices in the defense, banking, insurance and technology markets.
Catz spoke on the same day that some 400 Google and Amazon workers signed a letter calling on their companies to pull out of Project Nimbus and cut ties with the IDF.
Project Nimbus is Israel’s drive to build its own local cloud storage server centers and migrate the country’s public information technology to the cloud. Google and Amazon won the bid to set up and operate it.
Born in Holon, Catz, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, became Oracle’s CEO in 2014.
“For decades, we have said you cannot secure a system by just locking the doors and bolting the windows.
“You have to have a completely steel foundation. It is why our cloud has special technologies in it that don’t even allow other users or even us, as the network operator, to access the data. It is also why our systems are autonomous. Because one of the biggest ways that the bad guys, whether countries or criminals, get in is by human error. So, we built so many of our systems to not allow for human error.”
Catz said that “this is such an amazing time” for advancing technology worldwide.