'Our bad - there should be no on and off button for security, it should always be on' says Oracle's Larry Ellison

Oracle is to push security down to the hardware layer in a bid to protect its customers from the likes of Venom and Heartbleed

Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison suggested that Oracle would be taking a different approach to the way it handles security in its products, when he said that security should "always be on".

Addressing delegates at the opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Ellison said that Oracle has been working on several design goals, the most important of which is security.

He then claimed that customers would buy security features from Oracle but not turn them on.

However, he emphasised that he "wasn't blaming them or anybody", and instead let Oracle take the blame for what he suggested was a design flaw.

"Our bad - there should be no on and off switch on security, it should always be on; everything should always be encrypted," he said.

He said that Oracle needed to change the way it thought about security to ensure it can prevent security vulnerabilities such as Venom and Heartbleed from infiltrating its data centre network.

And he claimed that the company has "dramatically improved" its security features, and said that Oracle is pushing security down to the hardware layer to ensure that everything that's placed on the hardware is protected.

"Now it sounds impossible, and maybe we can't do that with everything but there is a lot of things we can do," he said.

However, he said that the company is seeing huge benefits with its new approach.

"It's just a huge problem that most of the security features we give [our customers], and then we tell them how to use them, and how to turn them on and we train [our customers] on them," Ellison said.

"Wouldn't it be nicer if they were just always on and you could use them and you wouldn't have to do anything?" he asked customers in the audience.

The former CEO of Oracle is expected to expand on what all of this means in his second keynote at this year's OpenWorld conference, which Computing will be covering.