It is a universal truth of software development that the easier an offering is to adopt and use, the broader its appeal becomes. Oracle Corp. set out to apply the principle in the public cloud last week with the acquisition of Ravello Systems Inc., a startup whose unique brand of virtualization promises to dramatically simplify the task of moving on-premise workloads outside the firewall.

Its hypervisor can encapsulate even the most complex distributed application into a self-contained package that is capable of seamlessly travelling across different types of environments. The arrangement avoids the need to make any major changes to the code inside when the underlying infrastructure changes, which has the potential to save months of tedious tweaking in some cases. Oracle hopes that the technology will make its cloud a more attractive option for running on-premise workloads than better-established alternatives like Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, but it’s facing an uphill battle.

Redmond’s server virtualization software is natively compatible with its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, which enables customers to migrate their workloads just as fast as if they using Ravello’s technology, but minus the complexity of an extra abstraction layer. The company pressed its advantage last week with the introduction of a new security mechanism for Azure that uses machine learning to detect unauthorized access. Active Directory Identity Protection analyzes information like the location from which a login attempt originates to determine whether it’s malicious in nature and choose the most appropriate course of action.

Depending on the severity of the situation, a user is either asked to present additional credentials before logging into their organization’s cloud deployment or simply denied access entirely. The functionality was rolled out alongside a host of new security capabilities for Office 365 likewise designed to maintain Microsoft’s edge over the competition, albeit not Oracle but Google Inc., which is making rapid gains with its rivaling productivity suite.

The search giant last week rolled out a voice editing option for Google Docs that enables workers to not only author but also format documents using natural-language commands. Workers can now switch fonts, enlarge their text and perform a variety of other common operations without touching the keyword, which creates much more room for multi-tasking. 

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