Microsoft and Oracle expand interoperability partnership to Canada to help joint customers run their mission-critical workloads

Oracle announced this week continued expansion of its cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft to help joint customers worldwide run their mission-critical workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its new interconnect location means enterprises can now build workloads that seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft and Oracle cloud regions in Canada. This interconnect builds on an existing partnership announced in June of 2019.

The partnership has received a huge amount of interest, as 80 percent of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software to run their businesses. 

As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier. These workloads include financial planning, inventory, sales applications – and their underlying databases.

The expansion will give more customers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, while providing first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies. This multi-cloud solution delivers the performance, easy integration, rigorous service level agreements, and collaborative enterprise support that they need to simplify their operations. 

Simply put, the Oracle-Microsoft partnership means cloud services run by the two providers will interoperate as if they were part of a single cloud, making it easier for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across the two clouds.

“The global demand for running applications and databases in multi-cloud environments continues to accelerate,” said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  “With the new interconnect, our Canadian customers can now take advantage of a nearly seamless cloud integration between the world's largest enterprise cloud providers, Microsoft and Oracle.”

The two companies are putting customers first by enabling them to run full-stack applications side-by-side across clouds, or one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within Oracle Cloud. 

For example, using the interconnect makes it possible to connect Azure services like analytics and AI to Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database. Together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

From a technical perspective, the interconnect means less latency or delay, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds. It also supports a broader spectrum of workloads, using resources available on both sides. Accenture recently performed testing on the performance of the interconnect and confirmed that the solution offers customers low latency and high ease of use.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions, including on the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and in the European Union. Earlier this year, Oracle and Microsoft created an interconnect in Ashburn (North America), Azure US East, and in London (United Kingdom).

Agero supports nearly half of passenger vehicles on the road with Oracle SD-WAN

Agero is using Oracle enterprise communications technologies to safeguard drivers in more than 115 million vehicles in the U.S. When a driver is stranded roadside, time is of the essence. With Oracle, the company has achieved continuous contact center uptime, so customers can get the assistance they need and are back on the road as quickly as possible.

For 45 years, Agero has provided smart solutions for its clients and their drivers. Currently, Agero’s  roadside assistance, accident management and consumer affairs services are leveraged in the U.S. by drivers in two-thirds of new passenger vehicles, policyholders from nine of the top 15 auto insurance carriers and customers of a variety of other diversified clients. 

Oracle SD-WAN was created to solve the ongoing IT challenges network managers face every day—from expensive, sluggish, inflexible WANs to difficulties deploying new office WAN links and accessing cloud services. 

With Oracle SD-WAN, enterprises can benefit from internet economics, leverage high-bandwidth and inexpensive Internet connections, and safely migrate applications to the public cloud and SaaS at their own pace – without sacrificing the high availability and predictable application performance they expect from their MPLS-only WANs..

To maximize the quality of its customers’ experiences and to eliminate communication failures or downtime, Agero needed predictable enterprise communications performance and real-time application support. Agero selected Oracle for the failsafe reliability, security and interoperability.

“When drivers are stranded on the road in the winter, creating not only an uncomfortable situation but also a health and safety issue, it is crucial for our customers to get directly in contact with an agent,” said Robert Sullivan, vice president, technology and shared services, Agero. “Oracle has the best of breed technology in the Oracle SD-WAN and Enterprise Session Border Controllers, which have helped us to deliver high availability, reliability and quality of experience for our customers.”

Since working with Oracle and Presidio to implement the Oracle SD-WAN solution, Agero has reduced downtime and created special routing situations for sites without substantial circuit diversity. This advanced, “always-on performance” is invaluable to Agero as the company processes more than 12 million roadside and emergency support requests per year.

“Agero is reinventing how driver assistance is delivered, while elevating the consumer experience in often dire scenarios,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications - Networks. “As enterprises demand flexible WAN solutions supporting shifting business requirements, Oracle is increasing and leveraging bandwidth for affordable and trusted WAN connectivity, anywhere and whenever it’s needed.”

In addition to the Oracle SD-WAN, Agero deployed Oracle 1100 Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) Oracle 3900 E-SBC and the Oracle Communications Converged Application Server (OCCAS) to protect its network and contact center from external threats.

Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

Trend Micro reveals that bug in Ryuk ransomware’s decryptor can lead to data loss in certain files

Ryuk’s decryptor tool — provided by the threat actors behind the ransomware to victims who have paid ransom demands — could actually cause data loss instead of reinstating file access to users. According to a blog post from Emsisoft, a bug with how the tool decrypts files could lead to incomplete recoveries, contrary to what the decryptor is actually meant to achieve.

While Ryuk has gained most of its notoriety due to who it targets and how much it tries to extort, the ransomware variant has actually seen a number of evolutions to its capabilities, which includes a revised encryption process. 

To make encryption faster and more efficient, Ryuk will only partially encrypt files that are larger than 57,000,000 bytes (approximately 54.4 megabytes) in 1,000,000 byte blocks — using a formula to compute how many of these blocks it will encrypt.

Traditionally, a file infected by Ryuk will contain a marker that shows whether it has already been previously encrypted with the Hermes ransomware, an earlier malware variant on which Ryuk was based. However, in addition to the Hermes marker, these partially encrypted files will also show a number beside the marker indicating how many of the 1,000,000 byte blocks were encrypted.

Due to a bug in how this number is calculated, the latest versions of Ryuk might accidentally truncate some files, removing a single byte of data from the file it was supposed to restore.

While a single byte might seem like a miniscule amount to get worried about (in most cases, the last byte is actually unused) — some types of files, such as those used in Oracle databases, store information in the last byte. This means that the removal of this single byte can actually result in an incomplete recovery, depending on the file type that was encrypted.

According to Trend Micro’s 2019 midyear security roundup, ransomware detections in the first half of the year increased by 77 percent compared to the second half of operations as threat actors seek to evolve their tools and methods. Ryuk is perhaps the most prevalent of the current ransomware families: It has earned the threat actors behind it millions of dollars from victims — typically, major organizations in both public and private sectors.

Given how widespread ransomware still is, it will benefit both organizations and individual users to regularly practice these recommendations to minimize the chances of a successful ransomware attack.

The simplest and perhaps most effective method to keep important files and data safe is to maintain regular backups — preferably using the 3-2-1 method of keeping three backup copies in at least two separate formats, with one copy offsite. IT administrators should ensure that systems, networks, servers, and applications are consistently updated and patched to prevent threat actors from taking advantage of vulnerable software and systems to deliver ransomware.

Organizations should cover all possible attack surfaces by implementing the principle of least privilege, where employees can only access parts of the system they need. Ransomware victims should also refrain from paying ransomware demands, as this encourages threat actors to continue with their campaigns. Furthermore, paying the ransom doesn’t even guarantee that the encrypted data will be restored, as seen in this scenario.

Organizations without dedicated security teams that want to bolster their security strategy can also look into taking advantage of services such as Trend Micro Managed XDR, which offers a wide scope of visibility and expert security analytics by integrating detection and response functions across networks, endpoints, emails, servers, and cloud workloads. 

The Managed XDR team is no stranger to Ryuk, and has extensive real-world experience investigating and analyzing the ransomware variant — as well as offering remediation advice — to customers.

Kinetica Active Analytics Platform and RAPIDS available on Oracle Cloud infrastructure to boost predictive data analytics performance

Kinetica announced Tuesday that the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform can now run predictive analytics on Oracle Cloud. The Kinetica Active Analytics Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bring historical data analytics, streaming data analytics, location intelligence, and artificial intelligence together in the cloud, simplifying the typical architecture for smart applications.

As new, highly complex data challenges arise as a result of the growth of the IoT, AI, and the smart device market, businesses across industries can address a variety of issues with the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform paired with RAPIDS, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, from predicting portfolio risk to limiting relevant variables in drug trials, programming inventory management to optimizing telco network capacity. 

Kinetica and RAPIDS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deliver active analytics to industries including healthcare, energy, telecommunications, automotive, government, retail, and financial services, among others.

Kinetica and RAPIDS accelerate machine learning-driven predictive analysis by leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s GPU instances for model training and inferencing, significantly reducing time to value. The Kinetica Active Analytics Platform now incorporates GPU-accelerated data science libraries using RAPIDS that are available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a set of complementary cloud services to build and run a wide range of applications and services in a highly available hosted environment.

Data scientists can now streamline development and improve accuracy by GPU-accelerating their entire data pipeline with the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform and RAPIDS, incorporating machine learning into active analytical applications. 

Data scientists are able to explore data within Kinetica, launch an environment for model development and training, and automatically deploy the model into the application for production use. On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this enables end-to-end GPU-accelerated data science in the cloud, at enterprise scale. With Oracle and Kinetica, organizations can now combine data analysis, location intelligence, and machine learning into their active analytical applications.

“With data emerging as the undisputed most valuable corporate asset, it is essential to offer the full spectrum of corporate tools to deliver relevant, responsive data analysis at scale,” said Irina Farooq, Chief Product Officer, Kinetica. “We are pleased to combine the power of the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform with RAPIDS on Oracle Cloud to enable cloud-ready active analytics at enterprise scale.”

The World Bee Project adopts Oracle cloud storage and AI analytics tools to enhance goals and innovations

Oracle announced a partnership with The World Bee Project CIC in 2018, offering the use of its cloud storage and AI analytics tools to support the organization’s goals and innovations such as its BeeMark honey certification.

Oracle will be offering cloud computing technology and analytics tools to The World Bee Project to enable it to process data in collaboration with its science partner, the University of Reading, to enable science-based evidence to emerge.

The World Bee Project is a private organization that launches a global honeybee monitoring initiative to inform and implement actions to improve pollinator habitats, create more sustainable ecosystems, and improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods by establishing a globally coordinated monitoring program for honeybees and eventually for key pollinator groups.

The World Bee Project is a UK Community Interest Company (CIC), designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good. It is the UK equivalent of a US Benefit Corporation, known as B. Corp. The World Bee Project supports the emerging holistic paradigm where society and the environment are seen as an indivisible whole, and societies and individuals define wellbeing and prosperity.

The aim of the WBP is to create a “world hive network” of remotely monitored honeybee hives and bumble bee nests. This will generate significant new data on the impact of different factors on the health of bees, such as land use, agricultural practices and forage quality. The aim is to gain a deeper understanding of disease, parasites, predator species, and control measures, in part by comparing what’s going on in different parts of the world, where different factors and outcomes can be observed.

This is where the cloud storage and analytics will really come into its own, enabling global storage, access and analysis of the information gathered — and sufficient computing power to really make something of that data, using AI on the big data generated by the world hive network sensors.

So, for the global economy, for the bees themselves, for food producers and food consumers (that’s all of us), it’s great to see this collaboration between a non-profit group, academia and the tech industry to address this issue. It’s also pleasing to see Big Data analytics proving its worth in this way.

The World Bee Project Hive Network remotely collects data from varying environments through interconnected hives equipped with commercially available IoT sensors. The sensors combine colony-acoustics monitoring with other parameters such as brood temperature, humidity, hive weight, and apiary weather conditions. They also monitor and interpret the sound of a bee colony to assess colony behavior, strength and health.

The World Bee Project Hive Network’s multiple local data sources provide a far richer view than any single data source to harness and enable global-scale computation to generate new insights into declining pollinator populations.

After the data has been validated by The World Bee Project database it can be fed into Oracle Cloud, which uses analytics tools including AI and data visualization to provide The World Bee Project with new insights into the relationship between bees and their varying environments. These new insights can be shared with smallholder farmers, scientists, researchers, governments, and other stakeholders.

“The partnership with Oracle will absolutely transform the scene as we can link AI with pollination and agricultural biodiversity,” said Sabiha Malik, founder and executive president of The World Bee Project CIC. “We have the potential to help transform the way the world grows food and to protect the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, but we depend entirely on stakeholders such as banks, agritech, insurance companies, and governments to sponsor and invest in our work so that we can begin to step toward fulfilling our mission.”

Oracle is currently looking at funding models to support the expansion of The World Bee Project Hive Network to ensure a global view of the health of bee populations.