Oracle Ellison on AWS, the fundamental problem of cloud security and the deployment of "Star Wars cyber defense"

Alarmist, provocateur or salesman?

Larry Ellison, founder and executive chairman of Oracle, has a perfect command of shock waves in the technology industry with a few lashes.

In his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld on Monday, the famous, inimitable and often despicable provocateur claimed that the cloud – every cloud – is built with a faulty and fundamentally insecure architecture.

Amazon Web Services is the only provider that the Oracle CTO has called – which will not surprise anyone who has heard about it in recent years. (AWS has not yet responded to a request for comment from CRN, but it is only a matter of time before the public cloud pillar fires.)

In contrast, Oracle's Gen2 cloud, known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), implements a "bare metal" design architecture that avoids placing Oracle code on any physical machine that hosts a client workload. According to Ellison, this approach makes Oracle's infrastructure the most secure offering in the industry.

Here are some highlights of Ellison's keynote address.