Larry Ellison: Modern Security Is Just Not Good Enough

Larry Ellison has called for a major rethink in the security industry as the technology sector faces more threats than ever before.

In his second keynote speech at the Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event in San Francicsco, the company founder said that there was a great need for ‘next-generation security’ to cope with the growing number of cyberattacks, as, “the current state of the art is not getting it done”.

He also reinforced his call for always-on security systems to be included in all new products, and for data encryption to come as a standard.

‘War’

“We need much better security – we need a next-generation security, because we are not winning a lot of these cyber battles,” Ellison (pictured left with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd) said.

“We are not losing a war, but we are losing a lot of battles,” he added, “we have to rethink how we deliver technology, especially as vast amounts of data are delivered to the cloud…we have to make sure it is secure.”

Repeating his call from Sunday’s opening keynote, Ellison once again called for encryption at all levels of the security process, and for an end to anyone ever needing to switch their security protection on or off.

“It sounds obvious…there should be no way to turn off encryption,” he said. “The only way you should be able to operate is with encryption…the ability to turn security on and off makes no sense.”

Secured

In order to facilitate this change, Ellison announced the new M7 microprocessor, which he said offers state of the art, always-on security features baked into the silicon itself, making it more secure than ever.

“Even best hackers have not figured out a way to download changes to your microprocessor,” he noted, saying that this is the first piece of silicon in the world to feature such software features inside.

The 32-core, 256-thread SPARC M7 microprocessor features Security in Silicon for advanced intrusion protection and hardware-assisted encryption, and can operate with a near-zero effect on performance spanning enterprise, big data, and cloud applications.

It is available now for businesses to order and implement, with Ellison saying that companies will only need a few of the products in order to protect their entire cloud, as once an attack is discovered, the other unprotected systems can then be patched.

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