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Oracle's Larry Ellison Faults AWS Security in OpenWorld Keynote

• By David Ramel
• 10/23/2018

Oracle exec Larry Ellison faulted the security of the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud in his opening keynote address at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Ellison, co-founder, executive chairman and CTO, has long targeted cloud service provider AWS, along with other executives, in presentations, statements and earnings calls.

Yesterday, he targeted a security sore spot for AWS, which has been the subject of many recent reports about unsecured data stores, though those were primarily blamed on user misconfiguration, not the architecture of the cloud platform itself.

But it was just that architecture that Ellison maligned yesterday.

"Other clouds around for a long time, they were not really designed for the enterprise," Ellison said at one point.

He also claimed a vulnerability caused by the AWS practice of housing cloud control code on the same machines as storage. "One customer can see the other customer's data," Ellison said. "Amazon can see your data, and the customers can change the Amazon code and hack the system."

Ellison touted Oracle's cloud platform in comparison, saying it was fundamentally re-architected for security and vowing that Oracle would never place control code in accessible locations like he said AWS and other clouds do, leaving it open for customer manipulation. Speaking to enterprise customers of such other clouds, he said: "You better trust your customers. You better trust all your customers."

Ellison also used AWS in a database performance comparison.

And Oracle news release said: "Ellison also shared benchmark test results during short demonstrations that highlighted the huge performance gap between Oracle and Amazon. The benchmarks compared Oracle Autonomous Database against key offerings from Amazon: Oracle Database running on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora, and Amazon Redshift.

"The direct comparisons also showed Oracle Autonomous Database's ability to continue running without interruption during database updates, highlighting the difference between Amazon's 99.95 percent reliability and availability SLAs, which exclude most sources of unplanned and planned downtime, and Oracle's 99.995 percent SLA guarantees."

OpenWorld runs through Thursday.