Corner Office

Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud Is More Secured; Aims At Large Enterprises

Vaibhav Gawde

At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2019 in San Francisco, Larry Ellison, Chairman and CTO of Oracle Corporation said the tech giant was bullish about the company’s cloud strategy than ever before. He highlighted the benefits of Oracle’s generation 2 cloud infrastructure – a more secure, second-generation cloud infrastructure, now enabling large enterprises a smooth transition from on-premises data centers to the cloud. Echoing similar views, Vaibhav Gawde, Head-Solution Consulting, Oracle India, speaks about the growth cloud infrastructure market and explains importance of Oracle’s second generation cloud to the Indian enterprise. Excerpts from the interview:


CXOToday: What is the current status of the Cloud Infrastructure market in India?

Vaibhav Gawde: According to industry research, only 15%-30% of enterprise workloads have been successfully migrated to the cloud. Given the current scenario, the market is going to further evolve as businesses rapidly embrace cloud infrastructure to boost performance. By 2021, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market in India will exceed $2.1 billion in end user spending, as per Gartner. We have witnessed growing adoption of Cloud Infrastructure in various industries, such as Healthcare, IT & Telecom, BFSI, Government and Education, among others across the country. We are now starting to see high levels of success and satisfaction from businesses that are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation, because of cloud infrastructure.


CXOToday: How is Oracle’s generation 2 cloud infrastructure different from its first-generation
public cloud offerings?

Vaibhav Gawde: Looking at the first-generation public cloud offerings, it was majorly built for cloud native, net-new applications. None of them were architected to accommodate traditional application architectures or to replace on-premises data centers along with a cloud deployment model. However, Gen 2 cloud infrastructure has excellent capabilities that not only adds those use cases, but also enables companies to be more flexible in the public cloud. Our Gen 2 cloud is purpose-built for the enterprise and future-proofs your business from both an architecture and an open-source-capabilities perspective.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a great platform for both traditional and modern application workloads and it’s uniquely differentiated for enterprise workloads, like database applications and data-intensive workloads like big data and high-performance compute. And, it has the proficiencies and the distinction to run all type of high-volume, high-performance mission-critical workloads for the world’s most demanding enterprises. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables customers to quickly acquire resources to speed-up development, test and launch cycles or host existing applications via a consumption or subscription model.

 

CXOToday: What are the key benefits to businesses using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Vaibhav Gawde: It enables organizations of all sizes and nature to take what they’re running in their datacenter and move it all to the cloud. The services are relevant for customers from start-ups to large scale enterprises that require a reliable platform to migrate or build applications or as part of a broader cloud strategy of SaaS adoption, application migration and modernization.

The Gen 2 Cloud offers up to 5X faster performance and significantly lower pricing vis-à-vis competition. This, along with enterprise SLAs (committing high availability and easy manageability) and autonomous data management (cut administrative costs up to 80%), coupled with unmatched security and choice (deployment model, pricing structure, ease of purchase), enterprises have a truly modern cloud with Oracle.

 

CXOToday: Can you share some success stories of Indian customers who embarked on this cloud journey?

Vaibhav Gawde: Mangalore-based AyusCare, a healthcare informatics company, was able to scale faster and deliver consistent performance to its end customers (hospitals or diagnostic centers) with our cloud infrastructure.

TTK Healthcare, part of the TTK Group, moved its on-premises Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and has seen great results: 3x performance improvement, reduced cost compared to their on-premises deployment, improved availability, faster month-end closures, enhanced security, and greater agility for application test and development cycles.

Another example is that of Federal Bank, one of the early adopters of Oracle Autonomous Database (exclusively available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) in India. By gaining a deeper understanding of how customers engage with the bank’s ATMs and the specific functionalities that customers found most useful, the bank significantly improved their ATM analytics. By analyzing data faster, in a more predictive fashion, the bank gained more actionable insights faster, enabling them to deliver new functionalities to end customers more quickly.

 

CXOToday: With security becoming a critical issue with the enterprise, what are the security-focused features of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Vaibhav Gawde: Security is one of our strategic pillars and a core principle of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Starting from infrastructure of our data centers, from the way we architect networks to the way we isolate compute environments and network resources, everything is covered under our OCI model. This kind of isolation ensures that no customer can see another customer’s traffic or data and have access to the cloud control plane. All customer traffic is in completely private, flat, three layered, software-defined overlay network and the compute provides each customer a dedicated bare metal server where customers can run their own operating system or hypervisors. Customers can make a choice to leverage other types of computing resources, such as virtual machines and containers. The separation between the vendor and the customer means that customers deploy their workloads in our compute and storage environments without any of our control code being accessible.

We look at security from the core to the edge – from the core of the infrastructure; the data centre’s storage, compute and network—all the way to the edge of the infrastructure. This also incorporates the (DNS) domain name system, global data services and global monitoring. The edge spans the end user connecting any application or workload. Our holistic, core to edge security proposition is the end-to-end visibility and control that customers look for.

In short, the easy-to-use triad of application, platform and network security solutions allow them to protect their workloads, have a secure application delivery using a global edge network, and constrain access to their services and segregate operational responsibilities to reduce the risk associated with malicious and accidental user actions.

Leave a Response

Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]