Cybereason Designates Oracle Cloud As Its Preferred Platform Under New Strategic Alliance

Companies cite the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s security-centric architecture and ability to create dedicated cloud service regions as advantages for the Cybereason Defense Platform.

Cybersecurity tech developer Cybereason is adopting the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as its preferred platform for its Cybereason Defense Platform under a new strategic alliance, the two companies said Monday.

Under the global alliance OCI will be the preferred platform for the Cybereason Defense Platform and its portfolio of malware prevention and network protection cybersecurity tools.

Cybereason will continue to offer its security technology to run on other cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Cybereason CEO and co-founder Lior Div said in an interview with CRN.

[Related: Oracle’s Cloud Roadmap Features New High-Power Instances]

“But I believe what we’re trying to do here is to create a secured, standard, preferred way to go,” Div said of the relationship with Oracle. OCI is “an architecture that we tested and we trust.”

The announcement comes with cybersecurity very much in the news as the known extent of the massive state-sponsored cyberattack against U.S. government IT systems and its impact, which came to light last week, continues to grow and puts a spotlight on the damage a cyberattack can cause.

“The past week or so, with the situation we’ve seen, this has become even more serious and I believe we’re going to see even more scrutiny of ‘Where is my data, what’s going on, who is protected, how exactly are you protecting yourself?’” Div said, alluding to the attack. “We’re trying to be ahead of the curve here.”

(The attacks are believed to have used the SolarWinds Orion network monitoring platform as an attack vector. On Saturday Oracle issued a statement saying the company does not use any SolarWinds Orion product as part of any Oracle product or cloud service, has no deployed instances of affected SolarWinds product versions in its corporate network, and “investigations have found no suspicious activity or indications of compromise.”)

The Oracle-Cybereason announcement also comes as millions of employees are working from home, potentially exposing more businesses and organizations to cyberattacks.

The strategic alliance is a win for Oracle and its OCI cloud service, which is competing against AWS, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform.

In September Oracle struck a deal with Xactly to run that company’s cloud-based sales performance management applications on OCI.

The two companies cited a number of benefits of pairing the Cybereason Defense Platform with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure including OCI’s performance, its own built-in security capabilities – including its ability to accelerate artificial intelligence threat detection – and its ability to quickly deploy Cybereason tools through OCI’s support of industry-standard tools like Terraform and Ansible.

OCI and Cybereason are a good combination for providing secure cloud services, said Ross Brown, Oracle vice president of OCI product management, also in an interview with CRN.

“One of the things about Oracle Cloud that is unique is the security-first architecture,” he said of OCI’s design. OCI offers security zone capabilities, encrypts data in motion and at rest, automates security patching, looks for system misconfigurations that can create vulnerabilities, and automates system administration tasks that can lead to system and database misconfigurations when done manually.

“That whole combination creates a really good environment on the cloud side for how you secure things,” Brown said.

With the sudden move to work-from-home necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and organizations that previously had employee devices and other endpoints running on secure networks suddenly found them connected to consumer broadband networks – along with devices such as video game consoles and children’s computers, the Oracle executive said.

“The attack vector for those endpoints became riskier as work-from-home started,” Brown said. “That’s where Cybereason became a really great partner for us, for being able to create and deploy an end-point solution that cuts through all the alerts and noise and gets right to ‘Where’s the problem and how do you solve it?’”

“The attack surface changed almost in a day, security perimeters disappeared and the battlefield, primarily, moved to the endpoint,” Cybereason CEO Div agreed.

Cybereason’s security technology is operations-centric, Div explained, collecting and analyzing huge volumes of security data from endpoints, servers and other systems in real time for threat detection and response.

“We were looking for a cloud that can be reliable, that had security at its heart – at the center of what it does – and will enable us to run this big data analytics capability in real time,” Div said of the decision to ally with Oracle around OCI.

The two executives also cited OCI’s global footprint as a significant advantage and the cloud platform’s ability to create dedicated cloud service regions – the latter making it possible to offer in-country hosting in more locations for customers who must meet data sovereignty regulations. Cybereason’s endpoint protection platform has been optimized for delivery through Oracle’s global cloud regions.

Oracle now operates 29 OCI regions around the world, Brown said, and that number will soon grow to 36. He also noted that Oracle offers the same pricing around the world. “The result of that is, it gives customers a globally consistent engagement,” Brown said.

In October Oracle launched the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform to provide management capabilities across the cloud stack and heterogeneous environments.

The new alliance also includes a partnership to jointly market and sell Cybereason-on-OCI solutions both through Cybereason and the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Cybereason follows a 100-percent channel sales strategy, including resellers and MSPs. Div said that with the new alliance, partners are not just working with his company, they are also working with industry “superpower” Oracle and so gain market leverage.

Oracle will be including Cybereason as part of its lineup of security solutions, Brown said.