Oracle opens five new cloud regions

Oracle aims to have 36 cloud locations by the end of the year, including a Government and Commercial cloud data centre in Newport, Wales

Oracle has opened five new cloud regions, adding Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Melbourne in Australia, Osaka in Japan, Montreal in Canada, and Amsterdam in The Netherlands to its cloud network.

The openings bring to ten the number of cloud regions Oracle has opened over the past six months. All five of the new regions should be available to customers now in the Oracle Cloud console, according to Andrew Reichman, director of product management at Oracle.

The company aims to have 36 cloud locations by the end of 2020. In Europe, it already has commercial Cloud Infrastructure Data Centres in London, Frankfurt and Zurich, on top of the new Amsterdam data centre, with one planned for Newport in Wales. It also have a Government cloud data centre in London, with a further one planed for Newport.

The drive by Oracle has been partly driven by privacy regulations around the world, which require citizens' data to be processed in the country of origin, as well as the need to provide locations for back-up.

"Customers have told us that to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes. They also told us that those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements," wrote Reichman in a blog posting revealing the new cloud data centre openings.

He continued: "Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where we operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020…

"We've also enabled a unique multi-cloud interconnection between Oracle and Microsoft Azure at an expanding list of sites. We currently offer preconfigured, high-bandwidth, low-latency links between Oracle and Microsoft cloud regions in the Eastern United States, London, and Toronto, with more expected to go live soon."

Oracle signalled its intention to expand its network of cloud data centres back in October 2019 when it announced plans to create some 2,000 jobs and open 20 regions by the end of 2020.

It is principally competing against Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Amazon claiming to have switched off its last Oracle database server in April last year - shifting its infrastructure to all-AWS.