Oracle Corporation, the world's second largest software company, is betting on the alternate computer-operating platform, Linux, by making efforts to strengthen the security aspects of the software platform. It is generally perceived that Linux lacks strong security features.
"We are contributing strongly to the open source community. Oracle will provide various evaluation material to the open source community to establish it as a strategic evaluated platform," Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer, Oracle Corporation, said.
She said this is part of the company's efforts to build security as the most important aspect of its products. "Security must become a part of corporate genetic material as implemented by plans, policies and processes. Oracle has been strong in this and has been taking steps by itself and participating in various industry forums," said Davidson, who is the first chief security officer to report directly to Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of the company.
According to Davidson, the company has incorporated security as the basis of its product development culture. "We have been in the process of developing strong secured development codes with a centralised group of security experts. Besides, Oracle as a policy is building security into functional, design and test stages of all the products," she said.
Oracle would continue to undertake core data server security evaluations with products such as Oracle 9i release 2 and Oracle 9i Label security being covered under this. Besides, the company is also extending its strong security checks to its entire product stacks.
Quoting one of the recent studies, Davidson said that the rate of incidence of computer security threats has increased in recent times with 90 per cent of respondents of a study agreeing to have detected security breaches in the last 12 months. She said that, according to a recent CSI and FBI report on computer crime and security, 80 per cent companies have suffered financial losses due to hacking.
Giving a break up of the source of security breach, the report said 74 per cent companies cited Internet connections as the most frequent point of attack while 33 per cent cited internal systems.
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