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Organizations increasingly want to move their workloads to the cloud, but don’t often have confidence in doing so. This is attributable to a number of factors — security, governance, stringent guidelines for data protection in regulated industries just being a few. 

But to effectively digitally transform — and to stay ahead of, or at least keep pace with the pack — modern-day companies really have no choice but to use some form of the cloud. 

Thus, organizations are increasingly calling for more flexibility in cloud deployments. 

To increase its customers’ confidence in this area, Oracle today announced the release of Oracle Distributed Cloud. The new offering is intended to provide more flexibility across public, multicloud, hybrid and dedicated environments, according to the company. 

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“We’re ultimately changing the way our customers think about the cloud,” said Clay Magouyrk, EVP for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

Increased cloud capabilities

Today’s announcement comes out of Oracle’s CloudWorld, and reflects growing demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), according to the company. 

The new options include Oracle Alloy and Oracle MySQL HeatWave for Microsoft Azure. 

Oracle Alloy, a new cloud infrastructure platform, will enable organizations to become cloud providers themselves. They can roll out their own set of cloud services to customers, brand and tailor the experience, and package services and applications unique to their industry verticals. These could include service providers, integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs), financial institutions or telecommunications providers. 

Organizations can also use Alloy independently in their own data centers and fully control operations to help address their specific regulatory requirements. 

Also announced today: MySQL HeatWave service will now be natively available on AWS. It will also soon be available for Microsoft Azure as part of the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. This is available across 12 regions — including a newly-launched region in Johannesburg, South Africa — via Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure. 

Oracle also announced today that OCI will add six commercial regions in Chicago, Serbia, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Saudi Arabia. In addition, it will offer two public sovereign regions for the EU in Germany and Spain, which regulate sensitive workloads. 

OCI Oracle Cloud Regions are a secure platform for all workloads that offer organizations a broad set of OCI services with improved latency in their own countries. OCI operates 40 commercial and government regions across 22 countries; it introduced 10 public cloud regions over the last year and has made the ambitious commitment to power all Oracle Cloud Regions with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Some regions in North and South America and Europe are already doing so. 

Continued cloud momentum

Oracle has also reported continued momentum of several of its products, including: 

• OCI Dedicated Region, which allows organizations to run the full set of Oracle-managed cloud services in their data centers as an independent, dedicated cloud, with integrated hardware and software operated by OCI. Dedicated Region counts among its customers Vodafone, which plans to deploy six Dedicated Regions in its data centers across Europe, according to Oracle. Nomura Research Institute, Ltd., is also in production with two Dedicated Regions.
• OCI Hybrid Cloud, which delivers cloud services at scale from the edge to the data center with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. OCI now manages cloud infrastructure at customer data centers in more than 60 countries as a part of its distributed cloud. Earlier this year, OCI previewed Compute Cloud@Customer, which enables customers to run applications on managed infrastructure in their data centers.