This week Oracle confirmed the addition of five new countries to its Generation 2 cloud platform. This news will increase the number of Oracle cloud data centre regions to 21, with a planned total of 36 to be available by the end of 2020. 

If this figure is reached, Oracle will have more global data centres than Amazon Web Services. The new regions will be located in Jeddah, Melbourne, Osaka, Montreal and Amsterdam. Each location is now available in the Oracle Cloud system.

Oracle has been focused on expanding its cloud infrastructure, an area where it has been viewed as lagging behind the three major cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. With the development of the second-generation cloud (often referred to as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), Oracle is shifting from a predominant cloud-focused business competing directly with AWS, Azure and GCP. Rather than just focusing on conventional infrastructure, Oracle is focusing on providing ‘bare-metal machines’ which have received significant scepticism.

Oracle has also partnered with Azure to combine direct fiber connections between their data centres and Microsoft cloud platforms, allowing bare metal users to utilise the services provided by traditional clouds. 

Expanding the Oracle Cloud – The expansions plans are a significant part of business development at Oracle. Beforehand, Oracle had been competing with a relatively small footprint compared to the big three cloud businesses, which may have made it less appealing to customers. Some customers have stated that to manage critical systems in the cloud, they need to be capable of operating workloads across independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes. Customers also require these multiple sites to be within the same country in order to meet data location requirements.

In order to meet these types of customer requirements, Oracle is put plans in place to provide a minimum of two areas in nearly every country where the Oracle cloud platform is operational. Three of the new locations listed, Osaka, Melbourne and Montreal now offer a second region within the same country, with Amsterdam also being linked to another EU region, Frankfurt. The UK, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India and Brazil will also have secondary regions active by the end of the year.