Oracle leverages machine learning to manage, secure enterprise systems

Oracle is not the first company that comes to mind when you think of enterprise security, but the company announced at its recent OpenWorld conference new products with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to quickly identify security threats.

The company introduced two new sets of integrated suites called Oracle Identity Security Operations Center (SOC) and Oracle Management Cloud. It claims they will help enterprises forecast, reduce, detect and resolve cybersecurity threats in minutes rather than days and assist remediation of application and infrastructure performance issues.

It makes sense for Oracle to jump into this field even if it is full of established players like Symantec, Sophos, Tripwire and far more. Since Oracle’s databases are often a target of hacker attacks, who better to secure an Oracle database than Oracle? 

At the heart of the system is AI and machine learning using security and operational telemetry to identify problems when they happen instead of finding out about them months later, as so often happens. It can then provide automated remediation to not only security breaches, but also performance outages.

Oracle Management Cloud suite

The new Oracle Management Cloud suite combines Oracle Management Cloud, Oracle Application Performance Monitoring Service, and Oracle Infrastructure Monitoring Cloud Service. Combined, these services allow for real-time, proactive monitoring and outage prevention, whether it’s deployed on premises or in the cloud. Oracle says the monitor can drill down to a line of SQL code if need be for error checking. 

The new Oracle Management Cloud suite includes the Standard Edition services, as well as Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service and the new Oracle Orchestration Cloud Service. With the two new services, customers can choose to automate the entire problem of automatic identification and resolution using machine learning without any human intervention required.

The Oracle Management Cloud has an analytics engine that is constantly updated with real-world data, providing it with evolving analytics. So, the engine constantly learns from the experiences of other customers. It can handle both “massive raw data ingest,” as well as “context-based enrichment,” and provide the steps for automated remediation. This makes the Management Cloud totally machine learning-driven and ideal for securing and managing complex enterprise networks. 

Oracle has also expanded its Oracle Log Analytics Cloud Service to monitor and analyze security and operational logs from a wide variety of both on-premises and cloud technologies, providing unified monitoring. 

Finally, the company said the new Oracle Configuration and Compliance Cloud Service is also now available. This service is designed to ensure continuous compliance with government regulatory requirements, including the rather onerous new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) due to go into effect next year.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for one of the kings of on-premises software. Oracle has pivoted to the cloud even faster than Microsoft, and it didn’t take a change in leadership to do it. Along with Microsoft and Adobe, Oracle is one of the real success stories in cloud reinventions.