Introducing the Generation 2 Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld 2018

Oracle built its Generation 2 Cloud from the ground up to provide businesses with better performance, pricing, and—above all else—security.

That was the message from founder and CTO Larry Ellison during his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2018, where he announced new security features and explained the overall benefits of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

"Other clouds have been around for a long time, and they were not designed for the enterprise," Ellison said.

Security First

The Oracle Cloud is a secure, unified architecture for all applications, from the Oracle Autonomous Database and SaaS applications to enterprise and cloud native applications.

Generation 1 clouds place user code and data on the same computers as the cloud control code with shared CPU, memory, and storage. That means cloud providers can see customer data, and it enables customer code to access cloud control code, which can lead to breaches and cyberattacks, Ellison said.

Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud, on the other hand, puts customer code, data, and resources on a bare metal computer, while cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture. With this approach, Oracle cannot see customer data, and there is no user access to the cloud control code.

"We will never put our cloud control code in the same computer that has customer code," Ellison said.

We at @forrester have talked about this for years. Security and privacy done right engenders customer trust and creates competitive differentiation. @oracle announced today that it’s Gen 2 cloud was built from the ground up for security. Security is its design point. #oow18 https://t.co/5uhlRAhh5l

— Stephanie Balaouras (@sbalaouras) October 22, 2018

Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud also uses the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to level the security playing field, because malicious hackers are using these same technologies.

"It's their robots versus your people," Ellison said. "Who do you think is faster? Who do you think's going to win?"

Ellison also announced four new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure security features: a web application firewall, DDoS protection, cloud access security broker support, and a key management service.

Price and Performance

Security was the primary reason that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was built from the ground up, Ellison said. Other major drivers were the opportunity to improve the cloud migration process and to provide greater performance and pricing to customers who make the move.

By the by, if anyone is wondering, Oracle Cloud IaaS is legit, Oracle is a hyperscale provider and I called it 3 years ago. Might share some scratch math to explain tomorrow. #OOW18

— Carl Brooks (@eekygeeky) October 22, 2018

If you run an enterprise application in a Generation 1 cloud, it usually costs more to run than it did on-premises, but that's not the case on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Ellison said. He also provided benchmarks that showed significant price and performance benefits over Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Ellison shows Amazon network charges 100x to move data out of their cloud compared to moving data out of Oracle cloud. The @awscloud comparisons continue, including compute, block storage, network costs where Oracle Cloud is significantly less. #OOW18

— Hyoun Park (박현경) 🏳️‍🌈 (@hyounpark) October 22, 2018

To stay on top of all the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure news at OpenWorld 2018, follow @OracleIaaS on Twitter and follow the #oow18 hashtag.