Oracle introduced several new built-in security capabilities to its cloud infrastructure including a cloud-native firewall service and enhancements to the Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Security Zones products. 

Oracle Cloud’s mission is to lower the barrier of the cloud journey for customers and make every product “simple, integrated and prescriptive,” Mahesh Thiagarajan, SVP at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told SDxCentral. “We will look out for you, we will bring the undifferentiated work of giving you a lot of out-of-the-box tools and capabilities that you just turn it on.”

Another mission is to “bring the ecosystem closer together,” Thiagarajan said. 

One latest example is that Oracle Cloud’s new cloud-native, managed firewall service is powered by Palo Alto Networks’ VM-series next-generation firewall (NGFW) technology. 

“It's a fully integrated native OCI service in the console, API's,” Thiagarajan explained, adding that Oracle and Palo Alto Networks partnered on the back end for the firewall, but “it's fully operated, fully made as-a-service by Oracle,” so customers don’t have to interact with Palo Alto Networks.

Plus, Oracle will launch this service in all of the regions they serve globally. “Especially for security, that is super important,” Thiagarajan noted. If launching the service at a later date for certain regions, that “basically tips the bad guys they don’t have a firewall.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced a similar partnership with Palo Alto Networks to integrate the security giant’s next-generation firewall into the public cloud. This firewall service is embedded within the AWS native services, so customers set it up through the AWS marketplace, but it shifts operational responsibilities such as deployment and maintenance to Palo Alto Networks, according to Anand Oswal, SVP and GM at Palo Alto Networks.

The differentiators of Oracle Cloud’s firewall services are “primarily around ease of use, direct buying experience with Oracle and a fully managed experience from us… in this particular case, we're taking the best firewall available in the industry, in the market, and leapfrogging to that position,” Thiagarajan argues. 

Another integration with its partner ecosystem Oracle announced is the threat intelligence service. It aggregates threat intelligence data across different sources including its own telemetry, open source feeds, and third parties, and then manages this data to provide actionable guidance for threat detection and prevention in Oracle Cloud Guard and other cloud services, the vendor claims. 

“We've partnered with various different vendors like CrowdStrike, and including our own threat intelligence … we make the data available at no cost as a stream for our customers,” Thiagarajan said.

“Instead of going and having contracts with like 15 different vendors and paying millions of dollars to get the data, [you can] get that data from Oracle for free, and you can integrate it with your third party center,” he added.

In addition, the company added threat detector and fusion applications detector capabilities to its Oracle Cloud Guard, along with the Oracle Security Zones expansion to support customer-defined policy sets and integrated security posture monitoring with Cloud Guard. 

Oracle’s Cloud Guard provides a centralized security approach that continuously monitors cloud configurations and activities and automatically remediates any security problems across all Oracle Cloud global regions. And the Oracle Security Zones are pre-configured secure enclaves within a customer’s Oracle cloud environment.

As a data management company, Oracle understands “security is top notch, security has to be the priority,” Thiagarajan said. “We took that very seriously from day zero.”