As a key architect of Oracle’s cloud strategy, Oracle Executive Vice President Clay Magouyrk has watched competitors blame major security breaches on their customers—specifically, on the incorrect ways they set up those other vendors’ complicated cloud security controls.

But in an interview with Business Insider, Magouyrk takes issue with that blame game. He asks, “What if it’s not the customer’s fault? Maybe the cloud provider is doing it wrong.”

Oracle announced on September 14 two new cloud-based services that take configuring security environments out of customers’ hands.

Oracle Maximum Security Zones provides preconfigured security controls, preventing cloud security misconfiguration errors in the first place. Oracle Cloud Guard continuously monitors mission-critical data, identifies security threats, and then automatically acts to fix them. Both services, built into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, are available to all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers at no additional cost.

“If Oracle can back up its new products’ claims, that could be a competitive advantage,” Gartner analyst Jonathan Care told Business Insider. “It could well move the needle…to have security built in from the outset.”

Oracle’s Magouyrk concedes that Oracle was late to the cloud infrastructure game, “but that means we can see where the industry is going and do a better job of getting there,” he says.

Rearchitecting Oracle’s second-generation public cloud was only part of the company’s “come-from-behind strategy,” he says. Oracle has also been hiring top executives—including Magouyrk, formerly of Amazon Web Services—away from its cloud rivals. “We didn’t start from scratch,” he says. “We absolutely hired people who had done this before—and gave them a chance to do it better.”

Read the entire interview with Clay Magouyrk on Business Insider (subscription required).

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