Sunil Mehra, VP-Cloud Platform, Oracle India, reflects on how Indian enterprises can gain from adopting Oracle Gen 2 Cloud.
The cloud market is experiencing tremendous growth with almost every IT major looking to grab a major share in the market. Oracle, best known for its databases, is making huge strides to rule the market. At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco last year, Oracle executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison already talked about cloud being incorporated into Oracle’s next-generation cloud that will make data an even more valuable asset. The company’s Oracle Gen 2 Cloud running the Oracle Autonomous Database is said to be one secure platform to run everything. The company believes, with much stronger security characteristics, this can be a game changer for cloud customers in India and across the world.
In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Sunil Mehra, VP-Cloud Platform, Oracle India, reflected on how Indian enterprises can gain from adopting Oracle Gen 2 Cloud. He also throws light on what makes Oracle Autonomous Database an important advancement in database management
CXOToday: How is Oracle Gen 2 Cloud different from other cloud offerings in the market?
Sunil Mehra: None of the first generation public cloud offerings in the market today were architected to accommodate traditional application architectures. They were architected primarily for net-new cloud native applications. Think websites, mobile apps, or ecommerce storefronts – certainly not financial systems, government workloads, or data-intensive applications. Many enterprise workloads simply cannot run in hypervisor-based environments, as they don’t provide the performance predictability and high availability often required by traditional enterprise applications. They are also not in perfect harmony with the tooling and security infrastructure historically deployed on-premises, in a complex ecosystem cultivated over decades.
All of this has led to a split between traditional and cloud IT, which in a DevOps world is converging fast. Analysts estimate only 15%-30% of enterprise workloads have been successfully migrated to the cloud. Part of that is technical, part of that is cultural, but that number will grow rapidly in the coming years and Oracle is poised to deliver to customers with our next generation infrastructure. We’ve purpose-built our cloud from the ground up to meet the requirements of large enterprises and complicated workloads. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the only cloud that can replace the on-premises data center, enabling companies of any size to run even the most mission-critical, high-volume, high-performance applications and databases, but with all the immense benefits of public cloud.
CXOToday: What’s the USP of Oracle Gen 2 Cloud in simple terms?
Sunil Mehra: Oracle offers the most flexibility in the public cloud, allowing companies to run traditional and cloud-native workloads on the same platform. This enables our customers to reduce operational overhead and costs and enable connectivity and shared data between these workloads. So a customer can, from a single technology partner, i.e., Oracle, avail the largest assortment of cloud services, widest system availability choices to empower hybrid cloud organizations and their executives, with the industry’s broadest variety of deployment and network connectivity options.
CXOToday: Could you explain how this changes the game for enterprise customers.
Sunil Mehra: This is new to Oracle customers and the market because it’s a breadth of offering never before delivered via a single control plane and APIs, marrying best-in-class hardware with all the management principles of on-demand public cloud. From our perspective, the timing is perfect. When you embrace flexibility of choice for customers and deliver an environment with tremendous price/performance advantages, the future opportunity is uncapped, the enterprise CIO, CISO is grateful and the day-to-day developer feels empowered.
CXOToday: Security threats have become more sophisticated. What’s your take on this?
Sunil Mehra: In the past, companies managed all their IT frameworks on-premises, resulting in tight control over supply chains, implementation and technology intensive tasks. However, in the digital economy, IT activities are being moved to the cloud and security operations center (SOC) groups are attempting to stay aware of the steady downpour of cybersecurity threats.We must be far more vigilant now.
From our vantage point, Oracle Cloud brings a 360 degree approach to security, which is why security is embedded by default, with security from the core to edge. Oracle has managed the world’s data safely for more than four decades! We understand the importance of compliance and governance. This is why we offer enterprises integrated governance through a combination of identity and access management, role-based access controls, and granular allocation and auditing capabilities so that enterprises are not forced to compromise their governance practices when moving to our cloud.
To counter the threats emanating from the edge of the network, into the core of cloud management, we’ve strengthened our security portfolio with a web application firewall, DDoS protection, Cloud Access Security Broker and a key management service.
CXOToday: Why is Oracle Gen 2 Cloud a more compelling cloud option for your database customers?
Sunil Mehra: Oracle continues to be the world’s most popular database by a wide margin, particularly for mission-critical applications. All our applications and platforms run best on Oracle Gen 2 cloud. Take for instance the Oracle Autonomous Database – the world’s first and only, fully self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing database – which best runs on the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud. In fact, several leading industry experts and analysts have acknowledged that the Oracle Autonomous Database is the most important advancement in database management in years. We believe this is a generational innovation that eliminates human errors, improves security and performance with automatic tuning, patching, and updates applied to the key database system.
