Oracle today made available two new cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools that it announced at last year’s Oracle OpenWorld event.

They are called Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Security Zones, and Bala Chandran, VP of software development at Oracle Cloud, said they play into the company’s strategy to make cloud security really simple for customers and available at no additional cost.

Security Zones automatically sets up and enforces security policies for customers’ Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environments. It includes more than 30 default security policies to prevent misconfiguration errors and avoid data breaches, Chandran said.

“We have a security policy that says you cannot create an object storage bucket that is not encrypted with a master encryption key that is stored on the hardware module,” he said. “So there’s a number of these policies that we’ve identified, and we embed this expertise, we turn them on by default.”

The second security service, Cloud Guard, continuously monitors cloud configurations and activities and automatically remediates any security problems across all Oracle Cloud global regions. Oracle claims this makes it the only cloud service provider to offer a CSPM dashboard and tools at no additional cost that also automates response.

“One differentiator is a real focus on simplicity and actionable remediation in both of these products,” Chandran said. “The second: we don’t want to make security a Hobson’s choice between can I afford my security or can I just afford partial security? So we are embedding this [in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] and we are not charging anything extra. They are available to all of our Oracle Cloud customers.”

This also mirrors Oracle’s broader strategy to win public cloud customers by touting its “second generation” cloud infrastructure with built-in security that costs less than its competitors — most notably Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We have the advantage, and the disadvantage, of being a 4-year-old cloud platform compared to AWS,” Chandran said. “AWS has the first-mover advantage, but we do have the advantage of looking at what has happened in the industry.”

One of these learnings he said is that “it’s really important to build the core infrastructure, from a security standpoint, from the ground up. And if you miss that early opportunity, it’s very hard to go and retrofit that.”

Despite this focus, Oracle still lags far behind public cloud market leaders AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In its most recent cloud Magic Quadrant report, Gartner said Oracle Cloud engineers built “thoughtfully architected, hyperscale cloud architectures that are competitive with the more-established cloud providers.”

However, Oracle remains a “niche player,” Gartner said, and it cautions that Oracle continues to lack the scale and focus of its larger rivals, with a perplexingly low market share in the public cloud database platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market where its history should provide it with an advantage.