Special region for compliance
Oracle is the latest major IT vendor to expand its European data centre capacity to help meet firms' compliance with the forthcoming European Union general data protection regulation (GDPR). Oracle has added the Oracle Cloud EU Region in Germany, with the addition of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offerings served from Frankfurt facilities.
Germany is a special case in Europe since it has already adopted some complex rules on compliance and looks like having one of the stricter regimes post GDPR.
For more on the GDPR impact, see recent news from experts speaking at the Amsterdam managed services event here
The German-based solutions will enable organisations to build and move mission-critical workloads to the cloud with “uncompromised security and governance” at a “significant price performance advantage” over existing on-premises infrastructure and competitive cloud offerings, claims Oracle.
The Oracle Cloud EU Region in Germany builds on the previously announced Oracle Cloud UK Region. The German facilities will consist of three “high bandwidth, low latency sites”, said Oracle, located within the Frankfurt metropolitan area and operating in a “completely fault-independent manner”. The new sites are expected to come online in the second half of this calendar year.
“This investment in Germany demonstrates our commitment to provide unrivalled state of the art technology infrastructure where and when our customers need it. This will be particularly important as companies ensure their migration to the cloud complies with impending EU GDPR demands,” said Frank Obermeier, vice president and country leader, Oracle Germany.
Tim Jennings, an analyst at Ovum, said: “The Oracle EU Region in Germany will provide organisations with the full spectrum of cloud services, delivered with the same levels of enterprise-class performance, security and availability they have come to expect from their on-premise technologies.”
Earlier this week, Microsoft expanded its UK cloud-hosted facilities in the UK to include Dynamics 365, joining Microsoft Azure and Office 365 which were already hosted from the UK. Chris Rothwell, Dynamics lead at Microsoft UK, said: "The introduction of Dynamics 365 to our UK data centres will greatly assist our customers in meeting the unique data and regulatory needs of the UK market, including the forthcoming GDPR legislation."