Database giant Oracle Corp. revealed today that it has five new cloud regions up and running.

They include a new region in Jeddah, which makes Oracle the first public cloud infrastructure company to offer data centers in Saudi Arabia. The other new regions have opened in Melbourne, Osaka, Montreal and Amsterdam.

Oracle said it ultimately hopes to have at least two cloud regions for each country it operates in. It’s planning to open a second region in Saudi Arabia later this year, as well as two more in the United Arab Emirates.

The idea is to offer its customers more redundancy for disaster recovery purposes and to help them meet data residency requirements. That should in turn give customers more confidence to move critical workloads to the cloud.

Speaking to Reuters, Clay Magouyrk, an executive vice president of engineering in Oracle’s cloud unit, said it’s important for the company to offer as many cloud regions as possible because many businesses are forced to retain data in the country where it’s created.

“Overall, the strategy is to put lots of regions around the world to give customers data sovereignty,” he said.

Oracle’s cloud coverage still falls well short of that of its rivals, however. Each cloud company uses different terminology to describe its data center footprint, but a “region” generally means a geographical area with multiple data centers in physically separate locations, or “availability zones.” Microsoft Corp. has 56 regions in total. Amazon Web Services Inc. operates just 22 regions, albeit with 69 availability zones.

Altogether, Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud service is now available in 21 regions, with the company on track to expand this to 36 by the end of the year.

Besides data residency and compliance issues, cloud regions are also important to satisfy the performance demands of enterprise customers, Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE.

“The monopoly game between infrastructure-as-a-service providers is in full swing,” Mueller said. “With its emphasis on two locations per country, Oracle is addressing the high-availability needs of enterprises for their next-generation applications in the cloud. Going forward, though, it will be less about the number of countries and more about the number of data centers providing the speed needed to have the latest technology platforms available.”

That said, building cloud regions is not the be-all and end-all of Oracle’s cloud strategy. In a blog post, Oracle Director of Product Management Andrew Reichman said the company has partnered with Microsoft to offer a “unique multicloud interconnection” between Oracle and the Azure cloud. The partnership is significant because it could potentially help Oracle make inroads with more enterprises that are adopting multicloud strategies.

“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,” Reichman said.

Despite Oracle’s trailing the public cloud leaders by a wide margin, it’s still looking to provide a better alternative to companies already using Oracle’s database and business software, particularly in multiple clouds and in their own data centers.

“Hybrid is the new black in 2020,” Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud, told SiliconANGLE last month. “People might move everything to the cloud, but that’s not going to happen overnight.”

The company is now focused on making infrastructure, database and business apps work together better. “We’ve taken a much more holistic view of the cloud,” he said.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: May Wong/Flickr