MY TAKE: DigiCert and Oracle partner to extend digital trust and scalable infrastructure globally – Source: www.lastwatchdog.com

By Byron V. Acohido

One meeting I had at RSA Conference 2023, was a briefing about a  new  partnership, announced this morning, between a top-rung Silicon Valley tech giant and the leading provider of digital trust.

Related: Centralizing control of digital certificates

I had the chance to sit down with Deepika Chauhan, DigiCert’s Chief Product Officer, and Mike Cavanagh, Oracle’s Group Vice President, ISV Cloud for North America. They walked me through a partnership that gives their joint customers the option to deploy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) combined with  DigiCert ONE. Here are a few of my takeaways:

Seeds of the partnership

In 2017, DigiCert acquired and commenced reviving Symantec’s PKI business. This was all part of the Lehi, Utah-based vendor’s efforts to support enterprise cloud migration and the rise of IoT systems, which were both gaining steam.

This ultimately resulted in the 2020 roll out of DigiCert ONE, a new platform of tools and services aimed at “embedding digital trust across the board within the enterprise and between all parts of the cloud ecosystem,” Chauhan says.

Back in Silicon Valley, Oracle was playing catchup. Amazon had introduced Amazon Web Services in 2006 and Microsoft Azure became commercially available in 2010. Oracle launched OCI in October 2016.

Cavanagh

As a latecomer to the hyperscale data center market, Oracle focused on its heritage of helping large enterprise customers securely and efficiently run their mission critical systems and applications, Cavanagh told me.

“We went out and hired engineering talent from our competitors, gave them a clean slate and tremendous executive commitment,” he says. “We told them, ‘If you had a chance to build a hyperscaler where security, performance, and high availability were priorities, with our enterprise customers in mind, what would you do?’ And that was the design point we gave them.”

Extending ‘digital trust’

As DigiCert and Oracle separately headed down these paths, digital transformation shifted into high gear and massive interconnectivity built off of wide distribution of ephemeral APIs took center stage.

In the past, APIs mainly connected users to websites and mobile apps. But APIs have come to be relied upon to hook company networks into AWS,  Azure and Google Cloud resources as well as to enable wide-open, rapid-fire software development practices, i.e. DevOps and CI/CD.

This highly dynamic, intensely complex operating environment has translated into an exponentially larger attack surface. So it was a natural progression for traditional PKI solution providers to extend digital certificates and PKI — the tried-and-true form of authenticating and securing digital connections – into this realm of hyperconnectivity.

DigiCert launched DigiCert ONE to innovate a more holistic approach to digital trust, Chauhan says, and the company has continued to innovate on that platform.

Today, DigiCert is focused on defining standards for digital trust, global compliance and operations, she says. This includes centralizing management of digital certificates and PKI across software supply chains, edge devices, remote users and evolving digital ecosystems.

“We understand the problem our customers need to solve,” Chauhan told me.  “Our focus has been on reducing the risk of business disruption, protecting attack surfaces and delivering identity-based digital innovation with ease.”

Late mover advantage

As DigiCert was innovating in the digital trust space, Oracle’s engineers filled their blank slate with a meticulous plan to distribute leading-edge  hyperscaler services globally — much more nimbly than Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

They divided the planet into 55 “public cloud regions” spread across 22 nations on five continents. The plan called for well-equipped, optimally sized hyperscaler data centers to be put on the ground near where demand could be anticipated.

Today Oracle delivers OCI services from 41 data centers in locales like South Africa, Spain, Serbia, Colombia, Paris and Chicago; secondary facilities are in the works for Chile, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Singapore.

“We can quickly roll out new data centers and deploy all 300 OCI services across each of those data centers,” Cavanagh says. “Our vision is to open up small to medium sized data centers in as many strategic geolocations as we can, based on input from our customers, and then scale those data centers out over time as the demand increases.”

Honoring data sovereignty

Name any business use case: banking, retail, healthcare, government, military, entertainment, elections. They’re all becoming increasingly dependent on hyperconnectivity. Oracle’s global deployment of OCI services clearly gives its customers more flexibility by giving them the option to deploy DigiCert’s digital trust platform.

Chauhan

With this partnership, DigiCert, which also operates regional data centers, gains an expanded capacity to localize the delivery of its DigiCert ONE platform to more locations outside of the U.S. This is a very big deal because of the “data sovereignty” rules emerging in Europe and the Middle East that require cloud-centric services to physically remain inside national borders, Chauhan observes.

To account for data sovereignty, Oracle has set up “sovereign cloud regions” in Germany and Spain to meet new data privacy rules.

“Oracle already is an undisputedly a leader in enterprise security with a software stack that now has jurisdictional sensitivity, as well,” she says. “If you combine a digital trust offering like ours with a really scalable infrastructure that you can take to any country, any region and provide services across different verticals, that’s a real strength.”

This is yet another terrific example of “stronger together.” I’ll keep watch and keep reporting.

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

May 9th, 2023 | For technologists | My Take | Q & A | Steps forward | Top Stories