Oracle Corp. today announced plans to expand its public cloud platform by building 14 additional cloud regions around the world over the next year.

A cloud region is a set of data center infrastructure resources that Oracle makes available to customers on an as-a-service basis. Each cloud region is made up of three fault domains, which are hardware deployments that are isolated from one another to a large degree and feature separate power supplies. Companies can spread their cloud workloads across multiple fault domains to ensure that they will remain available even if one of the underlying hardware deployments encounters technical issues.

The 14 cloud regions Oracle plans to add are set to span four continents. They will be built in Italy, Sweden, Spain, Singapore, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, U.A.E, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel and Chile. Oracle expects to operate at least 44 cloud regions worldwide by the end of 2022.

The 30 cloud regions currently operated by Oracle include 23 designed for commercial customers and seven built to the requirements of the public sector. Eventually, Oracle detailed today, it intends to operate at least two cloud regions in every country where it has an infrastructure presence.

Having multiple cloud regions in a country provides the same benefit as Oracle’s approach of equipping each region with three fault domains: It reduces the risk of an infrastructure outage taking customers’ applications offline. Setting up data centers in more locations also creates new revenue growth opportunities for Oracle. 

Oracle has many large enterprise customers with subsidiaries in multiple countries. For a large enterprise, there are benefits to storing each subsidiary’s workloads on a data center located in the same region as the business unit itself. Latency is lower than when connecting to a data center in a remote region and information can be processed faster. By adding more cloud regions, Oracle can help its largest customers optimize their information technology operations.

There are cases where companies need to keep information in the country where it was created to comply with data localization regulations. Operating infrastructure in multiple regions allows cloud providers to more effectively compete for cloud deals involving workloads that are subject to data localization rules. 

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has seen stellar growth over the past year,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “We’ve introduced several hundred new cloud services and features and are continuing to see organizations from around the world increasingly turn to OCI to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud. With the additional Cloud regions, even more organizations will be able to use our cloud services to support their growth and overall success.”

Oracle’s competitors in the public cloud market are also actively expanding their data center networks. Last month, Amazon Web Services Inc. announced plans to open a New Zealand cloud region in 2024. Microsoft Corp. is working to extend its Azure cloud platform to New Zealand as well, and in July Google LLC’s cloud business launched a new cloud region in Melbourne.

Like its rivals, Oracle also enables customers to deploy its cloud infrastructure and services on-premises. Enterprises can set up Oracle cloud solutions in their own data centers via the company’s Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer offerings. The company additionally offers a family of edge computing systems, the Roving Edge Infrastructure series, for running workloads at the edge of the network. 

Photo: Oracle