In the digital world, we’re driven by new services, applications, and levels of connectivity. We’re also driven by the management tools that help us work with an often diverse digital market. Most of all, digital modernization is being driven by data. But, there’s a big challenge looming over data management, one that has many security and business leaders asking the same question:
Why has data security become so incredibly complicated?
For starters, consider the sheer amount of data and the number of devices accessing data in clouds. A recent IDC study estimates that in 2025, there will be nearly 42 billion connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices generating 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data. As the number of connected IoT devices grows, the amount of data generated by these devices also increases, and that data becomes more challenging to manage and secure.
Here’s the other challenge with data: There are multiple clouds, as well as physical data centers, and more providers with different security models. Everyone and every device are transferring data, valuable data that needs to be protected from internal and external threats.
A New Way of Thinking About Cloud Trust and Security
The influx of data and devices is forcing leaders to consider technology that will help their security strategies becomes more predictive and prescriptive. Beyond that, leaders also want to reduce the complexity of managing all of this information. So, here’s the big piece of advice:
To take control and stay in front of the most critical threats, we need a cloud infrastructure environment that is simple and unified, and that runs with minimal human intervention.
During my keynote address at the latest 2020 AFCOM Data Center World conference, I made a clear point that the cloud is not here to kill the data center. However, cloud, automation, and data management can make the data center, and its critical resources, more secure. How are leaders simplifying what they do every day? What’s the secret to ensuring that both on-premises and cloud data points work together and stay secure? The answer is automation.
Everything that we’re discussing here makes automation imperative—creating and putting in place platforms, processes, and procedures to automate the delivery of security policies, patching, and endpoint analyses. And the solution needs to be proactive, not just reactive, against both inside and outside threats. The fact is that 85% of breaches happen where patches were available but weren’t used.
With automation in place around data applications, the virtual ecosystem, and even the physical environment, you can test and check for anomalous behavior, confident that the latest patches have been deployed. You’re removing a significant part of the security problem: manual operations that can be automated and simplified.
Automated, Self-Securing Cloud Infrastructure Simplifies Security
Our IT ecosystems are full of interconnectivity and shared services, and it’s this complexity that presents many challenges. Think about the growth of multicloud and the introduction of new tools, operations, and use cases into the modern business. Latency and poor performance can occur when you’re working with multicloud ecosystems. So, how do you ensure that your multiple, critical cloud solutions play well together?
Here’s an example: Your company might have an Oracle but also use Microsoft SQL Server. If you’re running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can manage it all from a single platform, automatically, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Microsoft Azure. This solution delivers seamless interoperability and extremely low latency.
A big part of the secret is that Oracle Autonomous Database provides a unified underlying platform, which delivers the proactive security and infrastructure management needs of today. If your organization is like many others—massively distributed with people working from everywhere—then your company likely has multiple teams across the IT spectrum working in security, applications, data, and more. And each has different security protocols and systems.
With Oracle Autonomous Database, different teams can all work on one automated cloud-based system that has taken over some data management tasks. This dramatically simplifies the update and security process.
Rethinking Trust and Security
One of the most advanced features of the Oracle Cloud ecosystem is its self-driving architecture. One specific component, and a game-changer, revolves around security. Specifically, Oracle Cloud’s infrastructure is self-securing. That is, when you develop an application on an application layer (think Oracle APEX, for example), underneath you have Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, which is a continuously self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database service that can instantly scale. Your developers don’t have to worry about whether the underlying development ecosystem is secure. It is, automatically—always patched and secured.
If a breach does occur within an environment, these kinds of autonomous systems respond right away to mitigate issues. Better yet, they reduce the risk and threat of breaches even happening. The system responds depending on the nature of the breach.
At other times, such systems look into user and network anomalies. According to the AFCOM 2020 State of the Data Center Report, two of the top four threats are inside and outside human risks. Protection at the perimeter isn’t enough. What makes the difference is seeing and treating it as an ecosystem, both sensing and enforcing your security policies.
Complacency Is Not an Option, and Hope Is a Bad Strategy
What’s holding back so many enterprises? Often, it’s not the technology; it’s the mindset of the decision makers. Your current processes and procedures might seem to be working fine in your environment. But, think about what you mean by “working fine.” It probably doesn’t mean that you’re getting all the security that you need or even the value that your business requires. It might just mean that everything’s working well enough right now but will fail when a data breach that could have been prevented occurs.
That kind of complacency is dangerous. It can harm not only the integrity of the data that you’re protecting but also the perceived integrity of your organization. It can lead from lost customers to lost jobs.
Consider this: To disrupt your industry, you might need to disrupt your comfort zone. Discomfort often keeps enterprises from moving to automated cloud infrastructure.
But now it’s easier than ever to test an autonomous system, to help increase your confidence and boost the understanding of the security benefits to all the stakeholders in your company. This is the big takeaway: You can test to see if these solutions work for you. You get to decide whether the systems you’re evaluating work for you or not. And if they don’t work, you can find out why and take the right next steps.
The fact is, you can’t afford not to test because you can’t afford to be complacent. By testing, you learn how to take your company further without risking a thing.