Oracle Corp. today announced plans to expand its OCI cloud platform by launching sovereign cloud regions in the European Union.

A region is the industry term for a cluster of data centers located in the same area. Oracle’s upcoming sovereign cloud regions are data centers located in the EU that are intended to host sensitive workloads for private and public sector organizations.

The facilities will “host data and applications that are sensitive, regulated, or of strategic regional importance,” Scott Twaddle, vice president of OCI product, industries and partners at Oracle, detailed in a blog post. 

Some enterprises are subject to regulations that require them to store data in the jurisdiction where that data was generated. Government agencies often have similar requirements. The new sovereign cloud regions that Oracle is building will enable the company to better support such customers. 

“As a general policy, OCI already does not move customer content from the regions our customers select for their workloads,” Twaddle wrote. “OCI’s sovereign cloud extends this practice by restricting operations and customer support responsibilities to EU residents. These sovereign cloud regions are also designed to further enable customers to demonstrate alignment with relevant EU regulations and guidance.”

Oracle plans to launch the sovereign cloud regions next year. The first data centers are set to come online in Germany and Spain. According to Oracle, the data centers will operate separately from its existing OCI cloud regions in the EU at both the hardware and software level.

Though they are designed to operate separately from the rest of the OCI platform, the upcoming sovereign cloud regions will offer all the services available in Oracle’s existing data centers. Pricing will be the same as well. Oracle furthermore plans to provide access to its Oracle Support Rewards savings program.

Another offering set to become available in the sovereign cloud regions is Oracle’s EURA service. The service helps customers ensure that their data remains in the EU. EURA also provides certain other features, such as the ability to remove important records from a dataset stored in a production environment before moving it to a nonproduction environment.

Some Oracle customers use EURA together with the company’s Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications product suite. Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications is a collection of software products used for important business tasks such as supply chain management. According to the company, deployments of the suite that use EURA will be migrated to the new sovereign cloud regions. 

“As companies and governments move more mission critical workloads to cloud, there is increasing demand for protection of sensitive data in public clouds that span national borders and jurisdictions,” Twaddle wrote. “Countries and jurisdictions are placing more requirements on data within their borders, and organizations are asking their global cloud providers for more transparency and control over how and where their data is stored, handled and secured.”

Oracle currently maintains 39 OCI cloud regions worldwide. In addition to simplifying regulatory compliance for its customers, operating data centers in multiple locations helps Oracle provide lower latency. The closer a cloud facility is located to an enterprise customer’s on-premises data center, the faster information can travel between the two locations.

Oracle regularly builds new data centers to expand its cloud platform. In the EU, the company has so far built six OCI regions. The data centers are located in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Marseille, Milan and Stockholm.

Photo: Oracle