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Glossary

This glossary provides definitions for key Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) terms and concepts used throughout the onboarding process.

Oracle Cloud Terms​

Tenancy​

The root compartment that contains all your Oracle Cloud resources. It's the top-level container for your entire Oracle Cloud account and represents your company's Oracle Cloud subscription.

Compartment​

A logical container used to organize and isolate cloud resources. Compartments can be nested in a hierarchy, allowing you to organize resources by project, team, or environment.

OCID (Oracle Cloud Identifier)​

A unique Oracle-assigned identifier for every resource in Oracle Cloud. OCIDs are immutable and follow a specific format that includes the resource type and location.

Home Region​

The Oracle Cloud region where your tenancy was first subscribed. This region stores your identity resources and serves as the authoritative source for your IAM configuration.

Service Principal​

A special type of user that represents an application or service rather than a person. Service principals are used for programmatic access to Oracle Cloud resources.

Identity Domain​

A container for managing users and groups in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It provides identity management, authentication, and authorization services.

Workload Identity Federation​

A method of authentication that allows external identities (like AWS IAM roles) to access Oracle Cloud resources without requiring long-lived credentials. It uses temporary tokens and trust relationships for secure cross-cloud authentication.

Identity Provider​

A service that authenticates users or services and provides identity information to other systems. In this context, it allows AWS services to authenticate to Oracle Cloud.

Federation​

The process of establishing trust between two separate identity management systems, allowing users or services from one system to access resources in another.

Trust Relationship​

A configuration that defines which external identities are allowed to access resources and under what conditions. It specifies the trusted AWS account and any additional constraints.

External ID​

A unique identifier used in federation to prevent unauthorized access. It must be provided by the external party (Upwind's AWS) when assuming access to your Oracle Cloud resources.

IAM Policy​

A document that specifies who can access which resources, and how. Policies use a human-readable syntax to define permissions at various levels (tenancy, compartment, or resource).

Instance Principal​

A capability that lets instances make API calls against Oracle Cloud services without needing to store credentials on the instance.

Federated User​

An identity that is authenticated by an external identity provider (like AWS) and granted temporary access to Oracle Cloud resources through federation.

Dynamic Group​

A group whose membership is determined by matching rules rather than explicit user assignment. Commonly used to grant permissions to compute instances.

Upwind Terms​

Cloud Scanner​

Upwind's automated scanning component that discovers and analyzes cloud resources for security risks, misconfigurations, and compliance violations.

Orchestrator​

A designated component or project that manages and coordinates scanning activities across your cloud environment.

Client Credentials​

Authentication tokens generated by Upwind that allow your cloud environment to communicate with Upwind's services.

Upwind Management Console​

The web-based interface where you configure integrations, view security findings, and manage your cloud security posture.

Security Baseline​

A set of security best practices and configurations that Upwind uses to evaluate your cloud environment's security posture.

Integration Terms​

Read-only Access​

Permission level that allows viewing and listing resources without the ability to modify, create, or delete them. Used by Upwind for security scanning.

Workload​

Any application, service, or computing task running in your cloud environment. Can include virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions.

Security Finding​

A specific security issue, misconfiguration, or compliance violation identified by Upwind's scanning process.

Remediation​

The process of fixing or mitigating a security finding to improve your cloud security posture.

Compliance Framework​

A set of guidelines and best practices (such as CIS, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA) against which your cloud configuration is evaluated.