Oracle has expanded the services available through Oracle Cloud at Customer so the portfolio now spans all of the major Oracle PaaS categories and, for the first time, also features Oracle SaaS services.
The Cloud at Customer approach, spanning SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, is particularly well-suited to organizations that are not able to move to the public cloud because of data privacy or data residency concerns due to industry or government restrictions. It allows them to maintain the status quo and move the cloud to the data as opposed to moving the data, said Nirav Mehta, vice president of product management, Oracle. In addition, latency concerns also cause some companies to prefer to have a local cloud in their own data center since often there are applications that have to coexist and integrate with new cloud-based applications, said Mehta.
To date, the Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio of services, which enables organizations to get the services that are available through Oracle’s public cloud in their own data centers, has been adopted by organizations across six continents and more than 30 countries, including AT&T and Bank of America.
Announced in May 2016, Oracle’s goal with Cloud at Customer, said Mehta, was to make it as simple as buying a service in the public cloud, consistent with public cloud functions and features, and to provide the same level of support as in a public cloud setting with one provider totally responsible for the stack.
Underpinning Oracle Cloud at Customer is a cloud infrastructure platform based on converged Oracle hardware, software-defined storage, and networking, and an IaaS abstraction. Oracle manages and maintains the infrastructure at customers’ premises and it is the same cloud infrastructure platform that powers the Oracle Cloud globally.
Expanded PaaS
With Oracle’s latest expansion of Oracle Cloud at Customer, organizations now have access to all five of Oracle’s major PaaS categories, said Mehta: data management, application development, big data and analytics, integration, and security. The services take advantage of enhancements that have been made to the underlying Oracle Cloud at Customer platform such as servers with faster CPUs and NVMe-based flash storage, as well as all-flash block storage to deliver even better performance for enterprise workloads.
New SaaS Availability
For the first time, Oracle is also making Oracle SaaS services available through Cloud at Customer. These services again address customers who want to use SaaS but cannot afford to have their data live outside their data center for internal or regulatory reasons, to give them complete choice in where they want to deploy the software and how they want to build out their hybrid cloud approach.
The availability of SaaS offerings through Cloud at Customer provide access to Oracle Cloud services, including enterprise resource management, human capital management, customer relationship management, and supply chain management, through a subscription-based, managed model, directly in their data centers.
Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine Availability
Also, newly available is the Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine, an optimized system delivering a production-grade Hadoop and Spark platform featuring dedicated nodes and the flexibility and simplicity of a cloud offering. This allows customers to now access a full range of Hadoop, Spark, and analytics tools on a subscription model in their own data centers.
The value of the Cloud at Customer approach is underlined by the upcoming implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), said Mehta, who noted, “It is yet another addition to the ever-growing landscape of regulations and the increased need to make the cloud hyper-local. While no one solution is the silver bullet for any specific regulation, this absolutely helps our customers achieve compliance with GDPR.” While it may not be the only thing that they have to do, he added, “the fact that the data does not leave the customer’s country or even their data center is usually a big element of data privacy requirements.”
For more information, go to Oracle Cloud at Customer.