February 7th, 2007
RSA 2007: Oracle keynote sans Ellison
Oracle CEO Larry Ellision was a no-show for his keynote this afternoon at the RSA Conference, out with the flu according to his substitute, Hasan Rizvi, vice president of identity management and security at Oracle (pictured below). Ellison is one of hardest acts to follow, and Rizvi did not attempt to mimic the master–no pacing of the stage, sniping at competitors or quotable statements.
Rizvi would not have survived the cut on RSA Idol, but most of the crowd in the auditorium stayed for his presentation, which consisted of a rundown on Oracle's identity and access management, Fusion Middleware and search products. Like other vendors who took that stage at RSA 2007, Ellison's proxy promised to provide a complete security solution for heterogeneous environments and to support standards.
He discussed database security as it relates to database administrators (DBAs) who potentially have unfettered access to privileged data. "You want to make sure that the DBA doesn't know the financial results before the CFO. It's a giant problem," Rizvi said. He highlighted the Oracle Database Vault as a solution for restricting access and control to data at a granular level without any application-level changes.
A challenge remains in finding the right balance between protecting information versus ease of access to information, Rizvi said. The solution? Oracle Enterprise Search, of course.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
