Larry Ellison – Security Is Our Number One Focus

Larry Ellison has called on all cloud and software providers to ensure that security remains their major focus when designing and developing new products.

The former Oracle chief, who joked he had now been ‘demoted’ to CTO at the company, took to the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event in San Francisco to give his opening keynote on the change in the cloud industry.

And coming in on top of his list of priorities when developing new Oracle products was security, he told the crowd.

Always-on

“I would put security on top (of the list of design goals)”, Ellison said, “it has become a bigger and bigger risk.”

“There should be no on/off button (for security), it should always be on, everything should always be encrypted…there should be no option to turn security off,” he said.

Oracle has come under fire many times in the past for supposed vulnerabilities in its Java programming product, which has been targeted by criminals many times before, but is now more secure than ever, Ellison says.

Ellison was keen to emphasise that security will be one of, if not the most important factors when building out a cloud product portfolio, especially given the increasing number of serious cyber-attacks taking place in recent months and years.

“We need to change our thinking about security”, Ellison said, “we need technologies to beat things like Heartbleed and Venom.”

Going forward, Oracle will also be looking to embed more security protection into its hardware, as Ellison says that doing this will make everything far more secure.

“The lower you push security, the better off you are,” he said, noting that this move will also help improve reliability of Oracle systems.

Ellison says that he wants Oracle to build and push out “non-stop applications” with zero downtime, as he is aware the company could lose customers who have the freedom of choice in what is an ever-growing market.

“Everything we make has to work all the time,” he said.

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