TikTok users’ data in US to be in safe hands of Oracle cloud

• Oracle to take 12.5% and Wal-Mart with a 7.5% stake in TikTok Global pre-IPO financing round.
• It is a big win for Oracle after the Zoom deal.
• Oracle official says Gen 2 data centres are the only data centre architecture created with true enterprise cloud in mind.

Dubai: Finally, TikTok users’ data in the US is going to be in the safe hands of Oracle’s second-generation cloud infrastructure as the deal gets Donald Trump’s blessing.

It is a big win for Oracle, after video-sharing app Zoom, as it is trying to narrow the gap between the top players such as AWS, Microsoft and Google in the infrastructure space.

Oracle has been adding many big names this year and more could follow.

According to Gartner, after SaaS, the second-largest market segment is cloud system infrastructure services or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 13.4 per cent to $50.4 billion in 2020 and $64.3 billion in 2021 as the effects of the global economic downturn are intensifying organisations’ urgency to move off of legacy infrastructure operating models.

The US President Donald Trump has given his blessings to a deal between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Oracle, temporarily averting a ban on TikTok in US app stores.

Under the deal, ByteDance will continue to be a majority owner of TikTok and Oracle will hold 12.5 per cent stake in TikTok Global.

Data to reside in a separate cloud

The deal will also include Wal-Mart with 7.5 per cent stake and the security will be 100 per cent, Trump said and added that they’ll be using separate clouds and very, very powerful security.

TikTok said in a statement that Oracle and Walmart will together hold up to a 20 per cent share.

“As part of the deal, Oracle will become our trusted technology provider, responsible for hosting all US user data and securing associated computer systems to ensure US national security requirements are fully satisfied,” TikTok said.

“We are currently working with Wal-Mart on a commercial partnership as well. Both companies will take part in a TikTok Global pre-IPO financing round in which they can take up to a 20 per cent cumulative stake in the company. We will also maintain and expand TikTok Global’s headquarters in the US while bringing 25,000 jobs across the country.”

Trump also said that TikTok would be incorporated in Texas as a new company.

Oracle takes security to next level

“TikTok picked Oracle’s new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it’s much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers,” Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, said in a statement.

“In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud… Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score,” he added.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz, said that Oracle will quickly deploy, rapidly scale, and operate TikTok systems in the Oracle Cloud.

“We are a hundred per cent confident in our ability to deliver a highly secure environment to TikTok and ensure data privacy to TikTok’s American users, and users throughout the world,” she said.

Andrew Sutherland, Senior Vice-President for Business Development – Technology License and Systems EMEA and APAC at Oracle, told Tech Channel News that Gen 2 data centres are the only data centre architecture created with true enterprise cloud in mind, right from the start, with a focus on security with AI capabilities, scalability and performance.

The key differences between the Generation 1 and Generation 2 cloud are that Generation 1 cloud places user code and data on the same computer as the cloud control code with shared CPU, memory, and storage, so, the cloud providers can see user’s data while Generation 2 cloud puts customer code, data, and resources on a bare-metal computer, while cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture.

Sutherland said that Oracle is the first public cloud provider to activate security policy enforcement of best practices automatically from day one to prevent misconfiguration errors and deploy workloads securely.

Security has been a critical design consideration across Oracle cloud for years, he said, and it should be foundational and built-in.

Many of the security breaches happened due to human errors, he said and Oracle is making absolute effort to eliminate, as much as possible, human errors.

“I don’t know whether anyone has an autonomous database that looks after itself and we are the only one who has taken security seriously and taken it to the next level. Security is built in every layer within the cloud – infrastructure, databased and applications,” he said.