Oracle has introduced Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, to help organisations manage their public cloud applications in an automated on-premises environment.
The new service comes as the enterprise software giant prepares its South African data centre region, which it has confirmed will be launched before the end of 2020.
The Cloud@Customer, announced last night at a global Oracle media briefing, provides organisations with a private cloud built from the same hardware and software stack used by Oracle Cloud, located in the customer's data centre and managed by Oracle.
South African organisations, according to Oracle, will now have access to the exact same set of services available in the public regions of Oracle’s data centres, providing them with the ability to address their data and security compliance requirements in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act.
It integrates Oracle’s portfolio of cloud solutions to enable organisations to access more than 50 cloud services, including Oracle's Autonomous Database and software-as-a-service applications, on-premises.
The service is charged on a subscription basis.
“Exadata Cloud@Customer has been successfully deployed at hundreds of customers, including large financial services companies, telecoms and healthcare providers, to modernise their infrastructure and lower costs by up to 50%,” says Juan Loaiza, executive VP, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle.
“We are now bringing Oracle Autonomous Database to customer data centres − freeing database administrators and developers from mundane maintenance tasks and enabling them to innovate and create more business value.”
Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer functions include database provisioning, tuning, clustering, disaster protection,elastic scaling, securing and patching, which eliminates manual processes and human error, while reducing costs and increasing performance and availability, according to the company.
IT spending in SA is set to reach $26.4 billion in 2020, up 2.5% on 2019, according to an IDC report. Infrastructure spending in SA (including servers, storage and enterprise-level networks) will grow 3.3% to $880 million, while infrastructure-as-a-service investments will reach $204 million, notes IDC.
Shireen Pillay, sales cloud leader for technology at Oracle SA, says over the past few years, enterprise adoption of public cloud services has gone mainstream, as more local companies take advantage of the pay-as-you-go economics, scale and agility of cloud computing.
“However, most enterprises still expect to continue to run a portion of their workloads in on-premises data centres for the foreseeable future. This has resulted in strong demand from customers for a hybrid architecture where the same services, same functionality and easy portability of applications exist between their public and on-premises cloud environments,” explains Pillay.
Until now, no solution has been able to adequately bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises environments: on-premises offerings from other cloud providers offer a very small subset of the services available in their public cloud regions, she adds.
Last year, Oracle introduced its first Future Ready Labs in Johannesburg, to help local organisations realise the potential of cloud technology, in preparation for the imminent arrival of its local data centres.
The software giant last year announced plans to build new cloud regions in the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, European Union (Amsterdam), Japan, Australia, India, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Chile, two in Saudi Arabia and two in the United Arab Emirates by the end of 2020.