Oracle today introduced four new built-in security features to its cloud infrastructure including a web application firewall, vulnerability scanning, jump hosts management, and certificate services. 

The new capabilities are built on Oracle’s existing Cloud Guard and Security Zones products, and they aim to provide simple, integrated security with no additional cost, according to Oracle VP of Software Bala Chandran. “We offer all our security features baked into the cloud, so we don’t make the customers choose between cost and security,” he said.

To improve the simplicity of rule management, Oracle offers a web application firewall (WAF) for flexible load balancer protection. The cloud-based security service enables customers to secure both their internet-facing traffic as well as internal application workloads.

“A lot of times you end up having two sets of policies, two sets of things you have to manage,” Chandran said, adding the new capability offers a single security policy set and combines a WAF and load balancers.  

On top of the WAF, Oracle Cloud also adds in a vulnerability scanning service that helps users assess and monitor cloud hosts to identify risks from unpatched vulnerabilities and open ports. The vendor will automatically manage the installation of these agents on all the hosts and handle the deployment, update, and scanning based on the schedule customers define, as well as report the vulnerabilities through Cloud Guard. 

This means customers don't have to pay third-party vendors to get a scanning and management service, Chandran said. ”We want to bake in as much of the security as possible,” he added.

Additionally, Oracle launched a jump hosts management service called Bastion to provide restricted and time-limited secure access and control to resources in its cloud infrastructure platform that don’t have public endpoints. And the vendor also announced a new cloud service that helps improve certificate management for transport layer security connections. 

Oracle integrated the four new services with the rest of the cloud security stack, which includes Cloud Guard and Security Zones, so customers can “have the single pane of glass to view their issues and remediate them and act on them,” Chandran explained.

Oracle 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. 

Meanwhile, Oracle Security Zones are pre-configured secure enclaves within a customer’s Oracle cloud environment. It includes more than 30 default security policies to prevent misconfiguration errors and avoid data breaches, Chandran told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. 

On top of the new security features, Oracle Cloud plans to offer a suite of tools for more risk detection and remediation capabilities through deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques, as well as additional services for filtering out the noises and only presenting relevant results to the users, Chandran said.

He added that the three main differences between Oracle and other cloud providers are simplicity, integration, and baked-in. “Security is not a profit, the revenue-generating function at Oracle, we believe we want to build the most secure cloud,” he said. “And if we do that, then customers will come and adopt Oracle.”