Oracle adds 2 UK regions, aims for 36 by mid-2021
Oracle is launching a dual-region government cloud in London and Wales to support UK government customers such as NHS as it ramps its infrastructure footprint.
The company's set-up is designed to be exclusively used by the UK public sector and includes the portfolio of Oracle Cloud services such as Autonomous Database, cloud applications and Kubernetes and VMware tools.
Oracle Cloud's expansion plans include a heavy dose of regulated and government services as well as autonomous cloud products. The two new regions in UK are the 27th and 28th for Oracle Cloud and the company plans on having 36 live by mid-2021, said Scott Twaddle, vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
"This is part of our strategy of building two regions in each country we're in," said Twaddle. "In the UK we meet data sovereignty and security requirements."
Twaddle added that the regions are staffed with UK residents with security clearances.
By using two separate sites in London and Wales tied together with Oracle's private network backbone, the company is looking to balance disaster recovery among independent regions as well as data sovereignty requirements.
Twaddle said the UK site selection was based on a threat analysis "so they don't face the same threat vectors." "We looked at natural disasters, power grids and geopolitical risks," he said.
Oracle said it designed the dual-region cloud with UK government and defence ministries. The UK government cloud from Oracle is the company's first physical location in Wales.
Oracle Cloud, which has landed large reference accounts such as Zoom, has been expanding. Recent developments:
- Oracle updates Exadata Cloud Service with persistent memory and 25-PByte Data Warehouse
- Oracle launches multi-cloud management platform
- Oracle rolls out improvements across SaaS applications
- Oracle Cloud targets more HPC, adds Ampere for first Arm offering
- Oracle Cloud Guard, Maximum Security Zones now available
Cloud providers have been in a race to add regions and Oracle has been ramping to court regulated customers. Oracle now has 28 regions globally. The footprint includes 21 commercial regions and seven government and dedicated locations for US intelligence services.
Oracle added that it is planning to establish at least two regions in every country where it operates. The US, Canada, EU, UK, South Korea, Japan, India and Australia have two regions with Brazil, UAE, Saudi Arabia and various EU countries will be getting two.
Twaddle said that Oracle Cloud is looking to support more government customers with a full slate of services as well as the same pricing as Oracle's public cloud offerings. "We're offering the full product set and have made a big investment," said Twaddle. "There's also assurance that when we select a region, we never move the data or metadata outside of borders."