Oracle announces new dual-region UK Government Cloud operating from data centres in London and Wales

Data centres in England and Wales are linked by a high speed backbone

Oracle has announced a 'dual-region Government Cloud', private cloud infrastructure designed specifically for the UK government's needs to store and process official information and transactions securely.

The dual-region cloud consists of two data centres for disaster recovery purposes - an existing facility in London plus a new one in Newport, Wales - connected by an Oracle-owned high speed network.

It expands on the company's existing UK Government Cloud Region, by allowing data to move between the two regions, and includes services such Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, OCI services and Fusion Cloud apps as well as storage.

"Today's announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle's second-generation cloud," said Richard Petley, senior vice president, Oracle UK and Israel. "This is a completely unique offering to the UK government - no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today."

Oracle says the new service was designed in collaboration with a number of government ministries and that it "adheres to the security principles outlined by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)", which includes including restricting access to data to SC-cleared Oracle staff. This will allow the service be used to store official sensitive data, all of which will remain on UK soil unless otherwise agreed, according to Oracle.

In a statement, UK Minister for Investment, Lord Grimstone said: "Building world-class digital infrastructure is central to the government's wider digital strategy ... Today's announcement marks a significant milestone in providing this to the entirety of the public sector - a step I very much welcome."

Oracle aims to have 36 cloud locations globally by the end of 2020. The drive for local facilities has been partly due to stronger 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 backup. In addition to the new facility in Wales, which offers commercial as well as government services, the company also recently opened a data centre in Amsterdam. The other European cloud infrastructure data centre regions, in addition to London, are Frankfurt and Zurich.