Oracle has announced the opening of its second cloud region in the UAE, through which the organisation seeks to strengthen its support for local enterprises with cloud services.
The Oracle Cloud Abu Dhabi Region and the Oracle Cloud Dubai Region will provide customers with stronger business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The opening of the Abu Dhabi Region also directly supports the UAE’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Strategy which focuses on advancing the national economy by driving innovation with the latest technologies.
“The rapid adoption of cloud-based technologies like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning is vital for building a thriving digital economy and is a key priority for the UAE. With the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Regions, we have the required cloud infrastructure for organisations across public and private sectors, including SMBs, to accelerate their digital transformation,” said Richard Smith, executive vice president, Technology, EMEA, Oracle.
Both Oracle Cloud regions in the UAE are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which enable customers to easily migrate existing workloads and data platforms or build new cloud native applications that benefit from superior performance, lower cost, and built-in security capabilities. Customers will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, as well as Oracle Autonomous Database, giving them the opportunity and choice to create the architecture that best suits their business needs.
His Excellency Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade, said, “Oracle’s decision to open a second cloud region in the UAE is a clear reflection of our nation’s embrace of digital transformation, advanced technologies and the applications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which have become central to our economic and investment strategy for the next 50 years. We are committed to developing an innovative- and knowledge-based economy that encourages the development and deployment of the technologies of the future, and attracting human, financial and technological capital to the nation is central to these ambitions. Oracle’s continued investment into the UAE will only accelerate this process, providing critical infrastructure, expertise and insights to further elevate the UAE’s standing as a place where the boldest ideas and biggest projects can come to life.”
The rise of cloud in the region
Public cloud services adoption is accelerating at CAGR of 28% year on year between 2020 and 2025 in the UAE and IDC projects that the growth momentum will continue.
Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey & Africa, IDC, said, Cloud’s role in enabling innovation is underscored by the priority organisations have given to cloud in their digital transformation initiatives. Cloud-based technologies have helped organisations weather the covid-19 crisis and cloud is now helping them build a resilient organisation that can withstand uncertainties.”
He added that IDC found that CIOs in the UAE highlights that an in-country data centre is an important factor for 78% organisations that are planning to adopt cloud over the next 12-18 months. “Oracle’s two cloud regions in the UAE will boost local cloud infrastructure availability. IDC believes that cloud has become an inseparable element of an organisation’s digital transformation and innovation roadmap,” said Jyoti.
The dual cloud strategy
OCI’s next-generation architecture provides a high-performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design maximises performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centres for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures.
For business continuity and compliance requirements, Oracle’s unique dual-region cloud strategy enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographically separated locations within the UAE. To help customers plan data centre deployments to meet application requirements and optimise their cloud infrastructure, OCI’s provides a no cost inter-region latency dashboard that provides insights into real-time and historical latency for Oracle Cloud regions around the globe.
Enabling the multi-cloud era
Oracle Cloud regions support every Oracle service and feature and are available to customers anywhere in the world. This includes Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware solution, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.
OCI’s extensive network of more than 70 FastConnect global and regional partners offer customers dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud regions and OCI services – providing customers with the best options anywhere in the world. FastConnect provides an easy, elastic, and economical way to create a dedicated and private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance versus public Internet-based connections.
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In addition, OCI and Microsoft Azure have a strategic partnership that enables joint customers to run workloads across the two clouds. This partnership provides a low latency, cross-cloud interconnect between OCI and Azure in eight regions (Ashburn, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, San Jose, Vinhedo and Frankfurt) federated identity for joint customers to deploy applications across both clouds, and a collaborative support model. Customers can run full stack applications in a multi-cloud configuration, while maintaining high-performance connectivity without requiring re-architecture. They can also migrate existing applications or develop cloud native applications that use a mix of OCI and Azure services.
Looking ahead
Oracle has announced plans to expand its cloud region footprint to support strong customer demand for Oracle Cloud services worldwide. Over the next year, Oracle will open 10 additional cloud regions with new locations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.
Upcoming cloud regions include Milan (Italy), Stockholm (Sweden), Spain, Johannesburg (South Africa), Mexico, and Colombia. Additional second regions will open in Saudi Arabia, France, Israel and Chile. Oracle plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022, continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider.
The latest announcement also ties is with Oracle’s committment to sustainability, following its pledge to power all Oracle Cloud regions worldwide with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. Several Oracle Cloud regions in North America, South America, and Europe are already powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimise their impact on the environment. As part of its renewable energy clean Cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6 percent of its retired hardware in FY21 while strictly adhering to Oracle’s data privacy and security practices.
