Oracle Product Rollout Underscores Need for Trust in the Cloud

Oracle is expanding its Identity SOC portfolio and Management Cloud with new cloud-based tools for identity control and configuration management, the company announced today. The rollout aims to improve user trust as people grapple with securing more data in the cloud.

The Identity Security Operations Center (SOC) and Oracle Management Cloud were announced a year ago and made available in October 2017. Gupta says the security and management suite is intended to give users an "adaptive security framework" and leverage data analytics, including user identity context, to find and remediate threats.

"The industry is departing from traditional notions of 'blocking the bad' and 'allowing the good' that don't work when everything is potentially compromised and we can't identify good from bad," says Felix Gaehtgens, Gartner research director. Businesses need an "adaptive" approach to continuously assess risk and trust, and adapt their stance accordingly.

Users are currently comfortable using automation for tasks like configuration and patching, says Rohit Gupta, group vice president of Oracle Identity Cloud. However, when there's suspicious activity around a user, most people want to closely inspect the issue before moving forward. Many have voiced the need for new technologies to bring identity context into the SOC flow.

"More businesses are going to trust their cloud assets to be more secure, and deal with security requirements in an automated fashion, to the point where we think on-prem environments will probably present a greater risk because many of them don't have the right principles in place to make automated changes," Gupta explains.

Cloud-based ID Governance

The first update introduces cloud-based identity governance software, which relies on machine learning and cloud application risk feeds from Oracle CASB Cloud Service. This simplifies tasks like approving employee requests to access new systems, Gupta says. Managers no longer have to go through dozens of steps to approve access through a custom Web portal or application.

"We do this while validating the risk quotient of the user," he says. If someone requested access, it checks to see how long they've been in the system and risks they've brought; for example, if they've logged in through unknown endpoints in the past. These factors prevent users logging in with stolen credentials and lessen the risk of misusing admin privileges.

"Identity is king in the contextual equation," says Gaehtgens. "We need to trust the identity of a person, business or entity acting on their behalf … and we need to evaluate this continuously, all the time."

He says the industry is picking up on this trend and making security tools more connected. Security governance has become more automated, replacing manual human approval and access certification "that can easily degrade into rubber stamping," he adds.

Configuration Management

Oracle updated its Configuration and Compliance Cloud Service, built on its Management Cloud. This automatically detects configuration settings across the business and uses machine learning to find and address outlier configurations. Oracle's Security Monitoring and Analytics (SMA) service baselines data access patterns and finds anomalies by user, database, or application.

Consumer Identity Management

To help businesses correlate consumer data with marketing data, Oracle has integrated consumer identity management with its Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud. This pulls built-in consent management, social profiles, preference management, and activity attributes from the Identity Cloud Service to build more targeted marketing campaigns with consumer analytics.

"In many cases, part of what they look for are insights on what consumer preferences are," says Gupta. For example, he says, consider a hotel rewards program. In this case, hotels could target services based on customers' past history and preferences, but in a manner compliant with privacy regulations around the world, he explains.

Oracle is launching the Identity SOC in Oracle Cloud Marketplace, making technology integrations available to security vendors across the industry. The idea is to lessen the amount of custom work businesses have to do, Gupta says.

The Identity SOC gives businesses access to threat intelligence feeds they may not otherwise have. For companies hiring new workers, these can prove useful for determining a new employee's risk. Data from the Identity SOC can provide insight on behavioral patterns and devices, which can help gauge the potential risk of a new hire.

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