Oracle adds Saudi Arabia as cloud region, simplifies data residency and disaster recovery

Oracle has announced that it is making further inroads in the Middle East by adding Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as a cloud region. Along with Saudi Arabia, other countries Oracle has expanded to include Australia, Japan, Canada and The Netherlands. With these additions, Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud is now available in 21 fully independent locations around the globe. Oracle also adds that it plans to make 36 cloud regions available by the end of 2020.

Andrew Reichman, Director of Product Management at Oracle, notes that the expansion was based on customer feedback. In order to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes. And those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements. To that end, four of these new regions give customers a second site within the same country. The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.

Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where they operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.

Oracle Cloud has enabled a unique multicloud interconnection between Oracle and Microsoft Azure at an expanding list of sites. The company 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.

Adds Reichman, ”We’re similarly delighted to be serving the larger Middle East region, where 87% of the top companies by revenue use Oracle, and 54% already use Oracle Cloud. The first region, in Jeddah, will be followed this year by a second region in Saudi Arabia, as well as two regions in UAE. These represent Oracle’s first forays into the Gulf with Generation 2 Cloud regions, a part of the world that’s been underserved by other cloud vendors. Oracle is the first public cloud vendor with a region in Saudi Arabia.”