Oracle bolsters cloud computing strategy

Acknowledging the ongoing hype and evolution revolving around cloud computing technology, enterprise software provider Oracle unraveled their own cloud strategy that pushes for private cloud adoption by large companies.

"The hype around cloud computing is not dying down; in fact, it is steadily growing momentum, and continuously evolving over the years," said Sushil Kumar, vice president for product strategy and business development, Oracle, sharing a Gartner study that shows cloud computing situated at the peak of inflated expectations.

While many firms are hesitant to jump onto the public cloud, a type of cloud platform available to the general public with pre-specified features and offsite data hosting, Kumar said many firms can deploy private clouds on top of their existing hardware, which is more customizable and secure.

"Oracle is offering a technology stack that they can deploy on top of existing systems," he emphasized. Kumar said enterprise computing has gone from being very siloed, to grid systems, and now to private clouds bringing "utility computing" to its users.

Kumar, however, clarified that they are merely offering technology solutions to customers, and not complete deployable systems that include hardware and other components. That option, he said, is available through Oracle On-Demand, a selection of various offerings, from on-premise system implementations to multi-tenant SaaS deployments, that users can leverage to transition slowly into a full-blast private cloud.

The Oracle executive said they are ramping up their foray into the private cloud sphere in order to dispel security qualms about the cloud. "We provide companies with a private cloud platform so that they can take advantage of its benefits without too much risk," he stressed. "With private clouds, there is more control over security and other necessary precautions."

Oracle has also made available their software solutions through public cloud IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Hosting. "For public clouds, we have data encryption for databases and fine-grain access controls so data can be secure even off-site," he added.