Businesses, gov’ts losing cyber war, says Oracle chairman

SAN FRANCISCO – Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said before a global gathering of industry players and partners here that both the private business sector and most government agencies are losing the war against cyber security.

Sighing, Ellison said “Companies are losing the cyber war.” Not only that,“Most government agencies are losing the cyber war,” said Ellison as he cited the company’s Cloud Security at the unveiling of the company’s Autonomous Database Cloud, the world’s first, at the Oracle OpenWorld17.

Ellison blamed the proliferation of cybercrimes because both private enterprises and governments are not taking the cyber security threat seriously.

When confronted of issues of threats and vulnerability to cyber attacks, Ellison said companies or government agencies do not want to face it because it means slowing them down, which he said is a wrong priority.

“We have to elevate the priority in our data center because no one wants to be the front page having lost their data because no one fixes it when fix was available,” he added.

He cited billions and billions of dollars being lost to cyber attacks by companies. One interesting story he shared was about a big European defense contractor who passed on the issue of security of its IT system to the Human Resource department.

Ellison lamented the fact that a company engaged in defense contracts has wrong priorities. Just like the aviation system, companies that engaged in the protection of lives should give more priorities to measures against threats of cyber attacks and terrorism.

“The way to secure our data is more automation that automatically detects vulnerability before, during the attack and able to remediate it and shut it down during the attack,” said Ellison stressing that cloud computing is the secure way to do it instead of the vulnerable in premise computing system or the server system.

“The most effective way to fight cyber attack is through cloudbased computing because it does not require human intervention. Human beings make mistakes, I am not saying that cloud computing does not make mistakes but automation or cloud computing is much less to make mistakes than human beings. My autopilot can do better than me,” he added.

Oracle’s autonomous data center can identify vulnerability, prevent an attack and fight during an attack.

To do that, there is a need to build the autonomous data base by feeding it with huge data so the machine can learn about the patterns and behaviors of the data. This is the stage called machine learning.

“Huge data can be used to train computers to learn normal behaviors and patterns and use autonomous normal events. Once it has established patterns and behaviors then it can detect security breaches,” he explained. But for the machine to learn and able to establish normal behaviors, huge data must be supplied to the computer.

Autonomous data system has lots of other benefits that come with it like there is no human labor involved in its system.

“And because there is no human intervention, there is no human error and because no human labor, the cost is cheaper.

If Amazon will shift to Oracle, which is 10 times faster than its current system, its bills could drop down by 50 percent.