Oracle Announces 20 New Cloud Regions

Oracle has signaled its Cloud expansion ambitions at its Openworld conference, with plans to add 20 new cloud availability regions to its existing 16 by the end of 2020.

This will give a total of 36 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions, and the plan will see both the arrival of regions in new countries, as well dual, geographically separated regions in the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. In addition new government regions will be added in both the UK and Israel.

Additional regions

Oracle had already said an expansion would be on the cards, due to tough demands from customers.

Last month Oracle’s cloud infrastructure product chief, Andrew Reichman, said his firm had been forced into global expansion because overseas customers refused to house their data in its usual data centers.

At the time, the director of product management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Reichman, said slow networks and privacy laws were forcing it to build data centers overseas.

The company had already planned to nearly double the total locations where it has data centers by the end of the year, from 11 to 19, giving it 26 Oracle Cloud availability regions by the end of 2020.

And now Oracle has said that its “in country” dual region strategy is designed to help customers deploy both production and disaster recovery capacity within their country or jurisdiction to meet business continuity and compliance needs.

“Enterprise customers worldwide require geographically distributed regions for true business continuity, disaster protection and regional compliance requirements,” said Don Johnson, EVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“Multiple availability domains within a region will not address this issue,” said Johnson. “Unlike other cloud providers, Oracle is committed to offer a second region for disaster recovery in every country where we launch Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, a strategy that’s aligned with our customers’ needs.”

Oracle is aiming for a rapid expansion. It expects to open an average of one region every 23 days over the next 15 months for a total of 20 additional regions (17 commercial and three government).

The new regions for the Oracle Cloud in the US are Bay Area (CA), Canada (Montreal), Brazil (Belo Horizonte), UK (Newport, Wales), European Union (Amsterdam), Japan (Osaka), Australia (Melbourne), India (Hyderabad) and South Korea (Chuncheon). Other new regions includes Singapore, Israel, South Africa, Chile, two in Saudi Arabia and two in the United Arab Emirates.

Oracle also intends to open two regions for use by the British Government and one for the Israeli Government.

Oracle’s partnership with Microsoft has also developed, with Oracle expanding its regions interconnected with Azure. Since June this year Oracle has had two commercial regions interconnected with Microsoft Azure (Ashburn and London), and this is expanding to US West, Asia and Europe in the next few months. And similar to commercial regions, Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure will extend their interoperability into government regions.

This will now enable joint Oracle and Microsoft government customers to more easily move applications to the cloud.―DCD