Oracle Opens Cloud Region in Chicago

Oracle is expanding its cloud infrastructure footprint in the U.S.

The Oracle Cloud Region in Chicago is the company’s fourth in the U.S. and serves the Midwest with infrastructure, applications, and data for optimal performance and latency, according to the company last month.

The company hopes that organizations will migrate mission-critical workloads from their own data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Focus on Security, Availability, Resiliency

The new Chicago Cloud Region will offer over 100 OCI services and applications, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave, OCI Data Science, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Analytics. It will pay particular attention to high availability, data residency, disaster protection, and security.

A zero-trust architecture is used for maximum isolation of tenancies, supported by many integrated security services at no extra charge. Its design allows cloud regions to be deployed within separate secure and isolated realms for different uses to help customers fulfill security and compliance requirements. It has a DISA Impact Level 5 authorization for use by U.S. government organizations to store and process Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and National Security Systems (NSS) information.

The Chicago 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. The region also offers three availability domains connected with a high-performance network. Low-latency networking and high-speed data transfer are designed to attract demanding enterprise customers.

Disaster recovery (DR) capabilities harness other Oracle U.S. cloud regions. In addition, OCI’s distributed cloud solutions, including Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, can assist with applications where data proximity and low latency in specific locations are of critical importance.

Oracle has committed to powering all worldwide Oracle Cloud Regions with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, are powered by renewable energy.

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“Innovation Hub”

Clay Magouyrk, EVP at OCI, said the Midwest is “a global innovation hub across key industries,” as it’s home to over “20% of the Fortune ‘500,’ 60% of all U.S. manufacturing, and the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange.”

“These industries are increasingly seeking secure cloud services to support their need for high-speed data transfer at ultra-low latency,” Magouyrk said.

Samia Tarraf, Oracle Business Group global lead at Accenture, said the Oracle Cloud Region in Chicago will “provide clients with more choices for their cloud deployments.”

“We look forward to collaborating with Oracle to help organizations in the Midwest more quickly and easily harness the business-changing benefits of the cloud,” Tarraf said.

Oracle in the Growing Cloud Market 

Oracle holds an estimated 2% of the cloud infrastructure market, as of Q3 2022, according to Synergy Research Group. AWS holds the first position at 34%.

Gartner numbers put the size of the annual cloud market at somewhere around $400 billion, with growth rates maintaining a steady climb of about 20% or more per year.

Oracle aims to carve out a larger slice of the pie. It now provides cloud services across 41 commercial and government cloud regions in 22 countries on six continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

“The days of the cloud being a one-size-fits-all proposition are long gone, and Oracle recognizes that its customers want freedom of choice in their cloud deployments,” said Chris Kanaracus, an analyst at IDC.

“By continuing to establish cloud regions at a rapid pace in strategic locations, such as the U.S. Midwest, Oracle is demonstrating a commitment to giving its customers as many options as possible to leverage the cloud on their terms.”

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