Oracle Opens Sovereign EU Cloud Regions Amid Spend Boom

Oracle will launch its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) sovereign cloud regions in the European Union (EU) next year, targeting regulated or strategic data and application hosting amid a projected increase in European public cloud services spending. Oracle will launch its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) sovereign cloud regions in the European Union (EU) next year, targeting regulated or strategic data and application hosting amid a projected increase in European public cloud services spending. The OCI sovereign cloud regions will be available to public and private companies with data and applications “that are sensitive, regulated, or of strategic regional importance,” OCI VP of Product, Industries, and Partners Scott Twaddle wrote in a blog. In general, Oracle says it does not move customers’ content from the region in which they choose to run their workloads. OCI’s sovereign cloud extends that practice further by limiting operations and customer support responsibilities to individuals residing in the EU, which “further enable[s] customers to demonstrate alignment with relevant EU regulations and guidance,” Twaddle explained. “Having cloud services with data centers that are located in the EU, and operated, updated, and supported by EU residents, while maintaining isolation from non-EU cloud regions is an important part of our cloud adoption. This will open up possibilities to adopt infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service in Finland for the government,” Jarkko Levasma, Director General Ministry of Finance of Finland said in a statement. OCI sovereign cloud regions employ a set of policies and governance focused on data residency, security, privacy, and compliance. These policies will build a framework for data and operational sovereignty, “including how customer data is stored and accessed, and how government requests for data are handled,” Twaddle wrote. Oracle will facilitate the migration of OCI customers to its new sovereign cloud regions using the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications within its EU Restricted Access cloud service. Those customers will see the operational benefits of the sovereign cloud regions while having full native access to Oracle’s cloud services. Germany and Spain will host the first two OCI sovereign cloud regions. The operations and support of those regions will be restricted to EU residents and certain EU legal authorities, and those sovereign regions will be “logically and physically separate” from OCI public cloud regions in the EU like those in Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Marseille. Oracle’s sovereign cloud region news follows analyst predictions of continued growth in EU public cloud services spending. According to IDC, spending on public cloud in Europe will reach $113 billion in 2022, and is set to double by 2026 to $239 billion, representing a 22% compound annual growth rate over five years. “European companies want to automate their processes as they are experiencing market challenges including supply chain disruption and skill shortages. More frequently companies will adopt cloud to create a solid real-time data analysis foundation that support business agility and resilience,” IDC senior research analyst Andrea Minonne said. Public cloud is popular because it lets organizations focus on their core competencies while pushing off the challenges of owning and operating IT infrastructure to cloud providers. This has led to “a flurry of innovation” supported by “the ability to put efforts into the development of new products and services without the constraint of organizations’ ability to deploy them,” according to the firm. Geopolitical factors like the war in Ukraine are also influencing governments in particular to migrate critical data and apps to the cloud for security’s sake, IDC added.