We cross now live to Oracle. Mr Ellison, any thoughts? 'Autonomous self-driving computers eliminate human labor, eliminate human error' Oracle shares slipped in after-hours trading as the database giant reported fiscal fourth quarter results weighed down by the global coronavirus pandemic. The company delivered revenues of $10.4bn for its fiscal Q4 – the three months to May 31 – down six per cent year-on-year. Analysts on average had been looking for something …
Even an "autonomous vehicle" has to be told where you want to go. It can't decide that for itself. The same applies to "autonomous self-driving computer systems" - they can't decide your business strategy, or even your business tactics for you.
In my experience as a business risk consultant, the majority of human error stems from bad judgement at these strategic and tactical levels, so the "autonomous ... etc" computer system won't actually help at all. But it will probably sell like hot cakes to those whose lack of attention and vision causes them to make the strategic and tactical mistakes, because they'll be conned into thinking the machine will save them the hassle (see the growing number of tesla autopilot incidents for confirmation). And of course that's all any vendor is interested in.
"Eliminating human error dramatically increases data security and system reliability. All of the big data losses at Amazon were caused by human error. There is no opportunity for any human error if your data is stored in an Oracle autonomous system."
Which was coded by a human, using criteria defined by a PHB who can't articulate what donut he wants for his morning elevenses let alone describe a critical business service. No technical staff to check to see what was asked was right in the first place - just autonomous non-thinking code churning out who-knows-what.
I've seen 'autonomous' processes deploy garbage all over the place because there is no-one keeping an eye on what is going on. Garbage in, garbage out.
From everything I heard and read about at my last workplace, who decided to adopt SAP because of (presumably) hard sells and backhanders, SAP did rewrite many applications for the cloud (and spent a hell of a lot of resource doing so).
Unfortunately it was still SAP doing it, so it's just shit that happens to be in a cloud rather than shit that's hosted. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to discern which element is common to the two options.
I interviewed with them two years ago. They were wanting help building their cloud. The interview was going great until I started talking about the criticality of security. Dropped me like a hot potato.
So, no, security incidents in Oracle's cloud won't be caused by human error. They are part of the intentional design.
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