Srikanth Doranadula, Sr. Director – Cloud and Systems Business, Oracle India
“By moving to Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, the organization achieved cloud capabilities like flexibility, advanced security and scalability on-demand.”
What is the pace of digitization in the market?
Per a recent Nasscom report, the Indian cloud computing market is expected to grow at 30 per cent y-o-y to reach $7.1 billion by 2022. We’re seeing increased appetite among Indian organizations for accelerating cloud-led digital transformation, especially given the unprecedented challenging situation the world is facing currently. The pursuit of faster and better performance, consistently lower costs, ease of integration and smoother cloud migration have made cloud a compelling proposition for Indian organizations.
How is Oracle helping those companies with legacy systems in place, but are wanting to move to the cloud?
Oracle today is the only end-to-end cloud provider, with a full-stack approach to the cloud. Customers can decide how and when to begin their journey to the cloud, via IaaS/PaaS or SaaS. Further, we realize that some customers may have already invested a significant amount of time, energy and resources in building their on-premises IT estates, and might not be keen to move lock, stock and barrel to the cloud. For these customers, we offer a cloud-ready on-ramp. What this means is customers get to benefit from a cloud-adjacent setup, with the same reliability of on-premises, coupled with the elasticity of cloud, to pursue their digital transformation.
With cloud-adjacent architecture, enterprises will be able to reduce their data center footprint, while being able to leverage the scale and variety of modern public cloud services – with still having the control, precision as well as data ownership of an on-premises infrastructure setup.
Tell us more about your solutions for data management in a cloud-adjacent architecture model.
A number of enterprises, particularly in the regulated industries, are gaining significant business benefits with Oracle Cloud at Customer offerings. These provide the exact same public cloud kind of experience to customers – including superior cost benefits, but within customers’ own premises, behind their firewall. To put it simply, with Oracle Cloud at Customer, organizations can access our entire portfolio of public cloud infrastructure, benefit from our fully managed cloud services, and take advantage of Oracle Fusion SaaS applications from within their datacenters. As a result, customers can run applications faster, lower costs by using the same high-performance capabilities as well as autonomous operations, while also benefiting from the low-cost subscription pricing model made available to our public cloud infrastructure customers. Customers also get to maintain total control of their data, while complying with data sovereignty, security, connectivity and similar regulatory requirements.
Specific to data management, by using Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, organizations can access almost all of our enterprise-grade data management cloud services, including the world’s first and only self-driving, self-repairing and self-securing database – the Oracle Autonomous Database. This enables enterprises with more agility, scalability and elasticity while not adding further to their costs or complexities.
One example is that of the auto finance division of one of India’s leading automobile companies. Their auto finance division offers vehicle loans to consumers for purchasing small consumer vehicles. They were running their core lending application on hardware that was due for refresh. By moving to Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, the organization achieved cloud capabilities like flexibility, advanced security and scalability on-demand. Another example is of a renowned asset management company in India. The organization was running customized fund management applications used to service their customers across various portfolios, on ageing hardware. With a move to Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer, the organization achieved a smooth transition along with minimal operational disruption.
How do you collaborate with your partner ecosystem to make sure customers are well supported even after they start using Oracle solutions?
Partners are a very important part of our ecosystem and account for nearly 80% of our transactions in JAPAC in one way or another. Our modernized Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN 2020) program was launched to further empower our partners. It’s a customer-focused, cloud-first partner program that helps partners accelerate their transition to cloud, while driving superior customer experience and business outcomes. We have a dedicated set of partners supporting all lines of our business, across cloud, license and hardware tracks. We’re continuously looking to strengthen our partner network and help partners realize their business aspirations, with customer-centricity continuing to be our collective single-minded focus.
What’s your take on the cyber-security landscape?
In the digital economy, data is a critical business asset. Protecting their data from cyber-theft and misuse has become an enormous challenge for organizations. Even as the bulk of the responsibility falls onto a CISO, it’s very important to institute an organization-wide approach to safeguard data, led by a security-first culture. We’re seeing that the hacks are increasing in complexity, variety and impact. Therefore, a CISO just can’t afford to let his/her guard down, given the attack surface has expanded unprecedentedly, across multiple threat vectors. Paucity of top quality cyber-talent, and increasing regulatory/compliance requirements, both add further to the complexity.
Given the challenges, what cyber-security strategy should the C-suite adopt? And how is Oracle helping CISOs in this regard?
Organizations that depend on humans to a large extent to thwart cyber-attacks, are bound to face an uphill task. With hackers typically using sophisticated tech such as AI/ML/bots to mount attacks, sooner rather than later, organizations will need to get their balance right – of deploying more machines instead of humans to fend off the threats. In effect, cyber-security today needs to be a machine versus machine battle, where the good machines outsmart the malicious ones.
Oracle has securely managed the bulk of the world’s data for the last forty plus years, so security is in our DNA. Overall, we bring a 360 degree approach to security. So security is embedded by default in everything we do, from the core to the edge. It also helps if organizations embrace an autonomous approach to all things IT. Our flagship innovation – the Oracle Autonomous Database – is a great first step for organizations towards this.
We’ll continue to innovate and help our customers consistently improve their security posture. A couple of recent cloud security innovations we introduced are: Oracle Maximum Security Zones and Oracle Cloud Guard. These are pre-built tools that automate threat response, and reduce customers’ cloud security risks better, faster, and more efficiently. We’ve made these available to all our cloud customers by default, with no additional costs.
