Smart robots will win the cyber war: Oracle's Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison, chief technology officer (CTO) and executive chairman of the American technology giant Oracle, presented the company's vision for developing a robust and secure infrastructure driven by autonomous systems during the CloudWorld 2024 event held in Las Vegas, US. He also discussed why enterprises can gain by adopting multi-cloud environments, as opposed to depending solely on a single cloud service provider.

AI-powered cloud to combat cyber attack

“Most cyber attacks begin with human errors … so no human labour means no human error,” Ellison said, at his keynote presentation, stating that smart robots or intelligent autonomous systems will combat cyber attacks.

He further said Oracle would move all its applications to artificial intelligence-powered autonomous databases by next year to thwart any cyber breaches faced by its customers globally.

Comparing autonomous systems to self-driving cars, Ellison said, “We are using AI to dramatically improve our cloud security infrastructure and build autonomous systems. Our autonomous systems are just like self-driving cars, which are safer than those driven by humans."

“By 2025, we would be moving all our applications to autonomous databases. Besides adding to the security, it will make the software faster, reliable and customers have to pay less … overall, Oracle cloud infrastructure will become faster and more reliable,” the billionaire cofounder said.

“There are incidents where cyber hackers lock you out from your data and ask for ransom … autonomous databases and AI can stop such incidents of data and identity thefts,” Ellison said, highlighting the need for having biometrically authenticated login systems in place instead of manually adding passwords to boost cyber security.

“Biometric user identity will reduce the incidents of credit frauds and identity thefts. It could be also useful for many other applications such as passport control, secure school entry, wire transfers, bill payments and pick-up prescriptions.”

According to a report published by market research firm Gartner in August this year, enterprise spending on information security is projected to total $212 billion in 2025, an increase of over 15% from 2024. This year itself, the cybersecurity spending is estimated to reach $183.9 billion.

Taking multi-cloud to new heights

Oracle competes with Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and SAP for its share in the cloud market. Ellison said that customers want a mix of cloud providers and it is the start of a multi-cloud era where different companies can offer their products together.

“Customers use multiple clouds but those providers do not work together well as they are not well integrated. Our recent partnership with AWS will solve this problem.”

Ellison further elaborated on Oracle's partnership with the world’s biggest cloud-computing company and its key competitor, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will allow Oracle customers to run database services on AWS infrastructure, simplifying data management and integration.

Ellison invited on stage Matt Garman, AWS CEO, for more detail about the announcement. “It’s what customers have asked for a very long time,” he said as the duo shed light about how the Oracle, AWS partnership will drive adoption of multicloud.

Oracle is also bullish on private cloud with Ellison saying the company is trusted as a cloud provider by many enterprises with more sensitive data. The company is also building data centres within Fujitsu, NTT, and NRI, he added.

In Q2 2024, enterprise investment in cloud infrastructure services reached $79 billion, a 22% increase of $14.1 billion from Q2 2023, according to Synergy Research. AWS, Microsoft, and Google dominated the market with a combined 67% share, while Oracle and Salesforce tied for fifth with 3% each.

(The writer is reporting from Las Vegas, US, on the invitation of Oracle Corp.)