EC News DeskOracle today announced the opening of its second cloud region in the United Arab Emirates to continue supporting UAE organizations with enterprise 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. And, as part of Oracle’s unique dual region strategy they will ensure that all customer data remains within the UAE. 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 organizations 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.
Importance of Oracle’s Two Cloud Regions for Driving Foreign Investment in the UAE
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.”
Boosting UAE’s Cyber Security Preparedness
His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Hamad Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity for the UAE Government said: “The UAE Government has rapidly transitioned from being a conventional set up to a ‘smart government’ entity, and now with the increasing pace of digital transformation across the country’s public and private sector, we are progressing towards being an AI enabled government. This progress is in line with the digital economy goals of our country, but we must also ensure that the ‘cyber resilience’ of the UAE is maintained to mitigate cybercrime and increase international collaboration. Oracle’s two cloud regions in the UAE are important investments towards providing cyber resilience and secure digital infrastructure for organizations to enjoy the full benefits of cloud computing.”
Leading UAE Organizations Choose Oracle Cloud
Emaar Properties is one of the world’s most valuable and admired real estate development companies. With proven competencies in properties, shopping malls, retail and hospitality and leisure, Emaar shapes new lifestyles with a focus on design excellence, build quality and timely delivery.
“With fast-growing business operations that span different countries, at Emaar, we are focused on creating a future-ready digital infrastructure that supports growth, helps increase revenue, lowers costs and allows us to constantly innovate. Oracle’s new cloud region in the UAE will help us accelerate our digital initiatives with latest emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said the Emaar Technology spokesperson.
Emirates Post Group is the official postal operator for the United Arab Emirates, which owns several subsidiaries including Wall Street Exchange, a regional currency exchange provider; Electronic Documents Centre, a major digital printing business; and Emirates Post, the official postal services provider in the country.
Abdulla Mohammed Alashram, Group CEO of Emirates Post Group, said: “The world’s digital transformation is now unstoppable, and organizations have to adapt to the changes to remain relevant and competitive. In the UAE, we have seen increased implementation and integration of next-generation tools. In our industry, technologies play a big role to enable companies to meet the demand for speed in deliveries and cross-border services while enhancing operational efficiency and productivity. We are excited by Oracle’s next-generation cloud, knowing that its launch will lead to more improved services in the UAE and the region. It will also be instrumental in our efforts to fully digitalize our services by the end of 2021, which will significantly increase our capabilities in today’s digital age.”
Analyst Commentary
Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey & Africa, IDC said: “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. Cloud’s role in enabling innovation is underscored by the priority organizations have given to cloud in their digital transformation initiatives. Cloud-based technologies have helped organizations weather the covid-19 crisis and cloud is now helping them build a resilient organization that can withstand uncertainties”
“Our survey of the CIOs in the UAE highlights that an in-country data center is an important factor for 78% organizations 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 organization’s digital transformation and innovation roadmap,” added Jyoti.
Preparing UAE’s Next Generation for the Digital Economy
Oracle has been working toward creating a strong local IT talent pool in the UAE. Under the recently completed skills development initiatives with the UAE’s Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) and its commercial arm, the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research & Training (CERT), Oracle has upskilled 1,098 students in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and blockchain.
High Availability, Disaster Protection, and Dual Region Cloud Strategy
OCI’s next-generation architecture provides a high-performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design maximizes performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centers 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—without having sensitive data leave the country. To help customers plan data center deployments to meet application requirements and optimize 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.
Sustainability
Oracle is committed to sustainability and has pledged 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 minimize 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.
Cloud Regions Deliver All Cloud Services and Multicloud
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.
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.
Oracle Cloud’s Expanding Global Footprint
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.
