Some people still ask, “is Oracle a real player in the cloud space?” Oracle is focusing on things that matter to our customers: flexible infrastructure, cloud security, and regional growth. I’d like to highlight some thoughts about one area – regional growth.
Oracle continues to strengthen its position with cloud data centers. It is interesting to see the momentum increasing. I am pleased that our customers have increasing choices of cloud services with a total of 57 services available, 42 of which are available in all regions.
Expansion Globally
In my conversations with different industry analysts 12-24 months ago, their common sentiment was — Oracle is not investing enough in their data centers. They viewed Oracle as lagging in data center regional presence and pace of expansion.
Today, our access through cloud tenancies along with many recent announcements provide a different perspective. Oracle now has as many data center regions globally (24) as AWS; Oracle plans to outpace AWS in the near future. Within nine months, Oracle plans to have 36 cloud regions compared to 27 with AWS. That is an enormous change in visible commitment in a less than two years. The San Jose OCI data center, which was added in July, was the latest addition at the time of publication of this blog.[1] Check out the total regions here. [2]
Dedicated Regions
Oracle recently announced availability of Dedicated Regions. This is good news for specific customers. Although there may be initial hurdles for widespread adoption of that model, the option not only gives customers the ability to keep infrastructure and data resident to their location but also allows organizations to rely on Oracle as the cloud service provider to manage and update their world-class infrastructure within the location and network perimeter of the customer site.
The Dedicated Region footprint requires 2,200 square feet at the customer data center. The physical infrastructure cloud fabric inside is secured and managed by Oracle. The cloud services are then available to the customer as they deem needed and are easily expanded in a controlled fashion.
To top it off, Oracle provides Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in these Dedicated Regions, which other cloud service providers do not offer. These SLAs include 99.95% availability including planned downtime, disk IOPS, and network performance.
What’s Next
As Oracle adds more in the coming months—core commercial regions, government regions, dual-country regions, and Azure interconnects—we expect those improvements to be coupled with continued advances in security and infrastructure flexibility. Infolob will highlight those areas here too!
References:
[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/data-regions.html#northamerica
[2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/architecture-and-regions.html
