1 Introduction
Oracle Corporation is a multinational technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. Established in 1977 to develop a relational database management system, Oracle has grown into one of the largest companies in the software industry. Owing partially to its extensive acquisition strategy, Oracle’s portfolio of products and services is remarkably wide, including database, middleware and application software, enterprise management solutions, and even operating systems and development tools.
As companies are dealing with increasing volumes of digital information that powers their key business processes and in many cases, becomes their most prized asset, storing, analyzing and protecting this information is growing increasingly complicated. Ensuring that business data remains accessible even for the most critical workloads, that the most sensitive information is secured from external and internal threats and that both existing and new business applications are able to take advantage of the cloud model – to address all these challenges, a team of database experts is required, and those are, like in any other IT field, in an increasingly short supply.
Addressing this skills gap with new intelligent automation tools based on machine learning to reduce the amount of menial labor for administrators and to allow them to focus on more business-relevant tasks is a popular trend in various areas of IT and information security. As a result, the role of database administrators (DBA) is changing: instead of wasting their time on mundane repetitive maintenance tasks, they can now focus on more meaningful aspects of their jobs like data modeling, performance monitoring and even regulatory compliance.
However, as the very notion of “autonomous” implies, Oracle goes much further than just automation with its newest offering: their Autonomous Database is designed not to expose any controls to human administrators at all, thus completely eliminating human factor from database management. A DBA only needs to define a few policies, and the rest happens automatically, including instance provisioning, resource scaling, patching and updates, backup and recovery and even performance tuning. This approach has immense potential benefits not just for reducing labor and costs for customers, but for dramatically improving database’s resiliency against both human errors and malicious activities, internal or external. Each database is also guaranteed to have all security features enabled by default and all relevant parameters automatically configured according to the current security best practices and compliance requirements.
It should be stressed however that the Autonomous Database does not refer to a particular product from Oracle’s software portfolio. Rather, this outlines the company’s long-term strategy for supporting their customers’ journey to the Digital Transformation. At the initial stage, the company is offering a number of specialized cloud services for various types of enterprise database workloads, building upon the latest innovations in the Oracle Database 18c, power of Oracle Exadata hardware platform and the expertise of the company’s leading engineers. Needless to say, the services are exclusively available in the Oracle Cloud.
