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Oracle announced its new Trust Fabric initiative on July 26, in an effort to boost the security of its identity and access portfolio.
The Trust Fabric strategy is all about bringing autonomous security, enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, to more of Oracle’s portfolio. The Trust Fabric model includes cloud infrastructure security and monitoring elements as well as Identity and Access Management.
“There’s no alternative but to use identity as the basis of security because we’re really living in a post perimeter world,” Eric Olden, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle’s Cloud Security and Identity group, told eWEEK.
As organizations increasingly use the cloud and mobile applications, Olden said firewalls and perimeter-based security technologies are no longer effective. Identity, however, remains a constant across different deployment models for application usage, though there are still security challenges and risks.
The goal of the Trust Fabric model is to integrate threat intelligence and machine learning into Oracle’s identity and access technologies and capabilities to enable organizations to use identity more securely, Olden said. With Trust Fabric there is additional visibility into how an identity is being used, and activities can be monitored to help identify anomalous behaviors. The Trust Fabric visibility can then be used to generate a risk score for an identity or access request, which is integrated with the Oracle Identity Cloud.
Instead of just providing a risk score, the goal for the system is to also provide autonomous capabilities, Olden said. For example, based on policy for a given risk score, an additional access challenge for multifactor authentication can be triggered. By taking an automated approach with Trust Fabric, Oracle is removing the need for human intervention to help expedite security decisions, he said.
“We’re really solving two of the biggest problems organizations face,” Olden said. “How long … it takes to find out that there’s a problem, and then how long it takes to do something about it.”
Autonomous Security
Trust Fabric is an extension of autonomous capabilities that Oracle founder Larry Ellison first announced in his 2017 OpenWorld keynote. The initial set of autonomous security features were focused on Oracle’s namesake database to improve threat detection and automated remediation.
“Oracle has made a huge investment in that machine learning technology, so portfolios like mine can take advantage of that,” Olden said.
Bringing autonomous technology to Oracle’s identity portfolio can reduce risk and improve productivity, he said. Rather than building out point products for automation, with Trust Fabric there is a unified approach for enabling autonomous security and threat capabilities across Oracle’s identity and access products.
Olden said Trust Fabric will be integrated in a cloud-first way as the delivery model. He added that products across the Oracle access and identity portfolio have been rebuilt for the cloud, in an integrated approach that Trust Fabric will help to enhance.
Olden said there will be more product and capability announcements coming during the OpenWorld conference in October.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.