Blog by Alexei Balaganski

Blog
Oracle CloudWorld Impressions
by Alexei Balaganski
Last week, I had an opportunity to visit Oracle CloudWorld, the company’s new flagship conference for customers and partners, which is also the reincarnation of the familiar OpenWorld after the three-year break caused by the Covid pandemic. With the new title and location - the event has moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas - everything I felt after stepping into the venue was somehow different and yet the same. On the one hand, I was glad to meet the same crowd and fellow analysts, as well as see many Oracle employees in person after years of just Zoom sessions. On the other...
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Do You Really Need a VPN?
by Alexei Balaganski
It looks like we are halfway through the Cybersecurity Awareness Month of October already, and I thought it might be the appropriate time to talk about VPNs. Again. Haven’t we talked about them enough, you might ask? Every time KuppingerCole analysts bring up the topic of Zero Trust ,  we feel obliged to mention how VPNs have long outlived their purpose, and how organizations have to finally get rid of them and move to more modern solutions . I’m fairly certain, there will even be a bunch of sessions at the upcoming Cybersecurity Leadership Summit talking about them....
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The HeatWave is Spreading
by Alexei Balaganski
Just over a month ago, I wrote about the partnership between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure that has finally enabled their customers to create “properly multi-cloud” applications without any hidden costs or limitations of earlier architectures. Well, unfortunately, announcements like that aren’t heard often, simply because the very idea of such partnerships goes against cloud service providers’ traditional business interests. This obviously has worked remarkably well for Oracle and Microsoft, but at least to a certain extent because there is no rivalry between...
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Who is Afraid of Security Automation?
by Alexei Balaganski
If there is one universally true statement about every organization regardless of size, location, or industry – it is that they all have too many security problems to deal with comfortably and in time. If you believe that you have your cybersecurity well under control, you probably simply don’t have full visibility into every corner of your IT… Unsurprisingly, the idea of replacing overworked (and increasingly scarce) humans with some kind of automation both for daily administrative routine and for responding to security incidents looks universally appealing to everyone...
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You Cannot Buy Zero Trust, But That’s Actually OK
by Alexei Balaganski
Zero Trust is undoubtedly one of the hottest buzzwords in the IT industry. The idea that just by following a set of simple principles an organization can dramatically reduce the complexity of its IT infrastructure and significantly improve its security posture and resilience to cyberattacks is, of course, extremely appealing to everyone. Unfortunately, even the companies highly motivated to adopt Zero Trust as their new strategy are often struggling even with the initial steps. If KuppingerCole analysts got a dollar every time we had to tell someone: “sorry, but you cannot buy...
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Finally, the Multi-cloud We’ve Been Waiting For
by Alexei Balaganski
“Multi-cloud” is a tricky term. At its face value, it simply means that your organization is using cloud services from more than one provider, right? But if it’s that trivial, why are so many people talking about “multi-cloud strategies” and why do entire market segments exist only to make managing your multi-cloud deployments slightly less unbearable? According to Flexera , over 90% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, and on average, a business is using the services of 2.6 public cloud providers. But of course, the number alone is not what...
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Is “Why Not Both?” Oracle’s New Product Strategy?
by Alexei Balaganski
I firmly believe that one of the key success factors of a product strategy in any industry is to be able to offer customers just the right amount of choice. Looking back at the history of such companies as Ford, Kodak, IKEA, or Apple, we can see that their success was to a large extent in their ability to sell not just a product, but an entire lifestyle, a single, convenient solution for all their customers’ problems, whether real or just invented by marketing departments. Of course, this approach does not work every time, as the eventual fate of Kodak indicates. Customer...
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Google is Buying Mandiant to Boost Customer Protection Against Multi-Cloud Threats
by Alexei Balaganski
Yesterday, Google has announced its intent to acquire Mandiant , a leading provider of cybersecurity defense and response services, for $5.4 billion – the company’s second-largest acquisition to date. When the deal is closed, Mandiant will join Google Cloud, further expanding its new parent company’s portfolio of security services, both in its own cloud and across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. To be completely honest, my initial reaction was somewhat akin to “Oh, poor Mandiant, they just won’t leave it alone…” After all, the company...
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SQL vs NoSQL? Why Not Both?
by Alexei Balaganski
The debate over which type of database is superior – the traditional relational (SQL) or modern document (NoSQL) ones – has continued since the NoSQL concept itself emerged around 2009. Back then, a popular opinion was that relational databases with their rigid data schemas and very limited horizontal scalability were already on the way out and alternative schema-less database architectures with their flexibility, ease of use, and seemingly limitless scalability were just the right tool for modern, highly distributed, cloud-native applications. Alas, the enthusiasm of those...
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Google Cloud Advances Security Capabilities by Acquiring SOAR Vendor Siemplify
by Alexei Balaganski
Yesterday, Google has announced that it has acquired Siemplify , a well-known provider of security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solutions, for an undisclosed amount. The stated strategic goal of this acquisition is to “change the rules on how organizations hunt, detect, and respond to threats”. The SOAR capabilities of the Siemplify platform will be integrated into Google’s own Chronicle security analytics platform to provide even better visibility and productivity for security analysts. Now, at the first glance, one could simply ask:...
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