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Oracle adds new cloud regions in five continents

The new regions include the first ever from a public cloud vendor in Saudi Arabia.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Oracle on Monday announced five new cloud regions, spanning five continents. It's adding a region in Jeddah, making it the first public cloud vendor with data centers in Saudi Arabia, Oracle said. 

The other four new regions are in Melbourne, Australia; Osaka, Japan; Montreal, Canada; and Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Oracle already has cloud data centers in Australia, Japan, and Canada, as well as in the EU. The new regions are part of Oracle's efforts to offer a minimum of two regions in almost every country in which it operates. 

That redundancy should be useful for disaster recovery purposes, as well as for meeting data residency requirements. It should give more confidence to business customers thinking about moving critical systems to the cloud. Oracle plans to add a second region in Saudi Arabia later this year, as well as two regions in UAE. 

With its five new regions, which are now open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console, Oracle has its Gen2 Cloud available in 21 fully independent locations. The tech giant is on track to have a total of 36 cloud regions up and running by the end of the year.

Oracle has pitched its Gen2 Cloud as purpose-built for the enterprise, but the company remains a niche infrastructure provider, with a fraction of the market share held by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. 

However, in its blog post Monday, Oracle said it's moving quickly to build up its infrastructure business, with an automated region-building process that lets it expand rapidly. 

Oracle has also partnered with Microsoft Azure, a much larger public cloud vendor, to offer a unique interoperability partnership that could help Oracle's cloud business make inroads with companies that are adopting multi-cloud strategies. 

Oracle highlighted the progress it's making in specific regions. In Japan, for instance, all 10 of the country's largest companies using Oracle Cloud. 

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