Oracle Data Safe

Rising digital transformation has multiplied the difficulty of securely storing, processing, and exchanging data, with breach costs averaging over $3.9M and “mega-breaches” reaching hundreds of millions, compounded by increasingly severe compliance penalties such as the proposed £183 million fine against British Airways. As a result, data protection has become a top priority for executives and policy-makers; many organizations want to outsource security to cloud providers, but the shared responsibility model leaves customers accountable for security and compliance outcomes involving their data and users.

Oracle addresses this gap by embedding many security and compliance controls directly into its cloud and database services, leveraging its later entry into IaaS to design a “2nd generation” infrastructure around Security-by-Design and strong isolation. Oracle emphasizes network-level separation of servers from the control plane, aiming to isolate customer workloads not only from other tenants but also from Oracle administrators. The Oracle Autonomous Database further reduces risk with self-tuning and self-patching and removes administrative user access, while delivering defaults such as encryption, secure backups, automated upgrades, and integrated database security measures.

However, infrastructure and database protections lack business context about data sensitivity, identities, and policies. Customers still must classify data, validate privileges, and ensure sensitive access aligns with corporate rules. Oracle Data Safe was released to centralize and automate these governance responsibilities for Oracle Cloud databases at no additional cost. It provides a unified control center integrated into the Oracle Cloud console and includes database security assessments, sensitive data discovery/classification (125+ types plus custom regex), masking (50+ formats), user risk assessment (static and behavioral factors), and centralized auditing/reporting. Key improvement areas include automated “fix” actions, more executive-ready KPI reporting, and potential on-premises support; a structural limitation is its Oracle-only scope.

• The average cost of a data breach exceeds $3.9M.
• “Mega-breaches” can raise breach-related costs to hundreds of millions of dollars.
• British Airways faced a proposed fine of £183 million for exposing customers’ data.
• 45% of policy-makers cite data security as their biggest concern in Oracle’s referenced report.
• Over 60% of surveyed professionals consider security the top benefit of cloud technology in the same report.
• Cloud service providers generally do not provide out-of-the-box sensitive data discovery/classification, access governance, activity monitoring, or user risk management.
• Oracle Autonomous Database enforces separation of duties by eliminating administrative user access.
• Oracle Data Safe supports discovery across more than 125 sensitive data types.
• Oracle Data Safe includes more than 50 predefined masking formats for common sensitive data patterns.
• Oracle was recognized as Overall Leader in KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass on Database and Big Data Security.

• “With the average cost of a data breach exceeding $3.9M, just direct financial losses can be catastrophic for many companies, not even considering indirect reputational damages.”
• “Customers no longer need to worry about the underlying infrastructure security, they still retain full responsibility for any security or compliance violation involving their data and users.”
• “The company takes a lot of pride in their 2nd generation cloud infrastructure, which was designed from scratch according to the Security-by-Design principle…”
• “To benefit from the strict network-level separation of cloud servers from the control plane, customers do not need to do anything…”
• “Security depends in part on appropriate usage, and the underlying database and the infrastructure lack the business context associated with customer’s data…”
• “Oracle Data Safe is a cloud-based service that centralizes, guides and automates major capabilities required for fulfilling the customer’s part of the shared responsibility…”
• “While Oracle databases are installed secure-by-default, it’s easy for the configuration to drift from the baseline…”
• “The principle of least privilege is a common approach towards data protection, but only customers themselves can usually make an informed decision…”
• “Extensive reporting capabilities of the service allow users to access the collected audit data for all database targets…”
• “Arguably, the only major limitation of Oracle Data Safe is that it’s designed to support Oracle Databases only…”