The News: Oracle’s new EU Sovereign Cloud is now open, aimed at aiding private and public sector organizations across the European Union (EU) to gain more control over data privacy and sovereignty requirements. Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud provides customers the services and capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) public cloud regions with the same prices, support, and service level agreements (SLAs) to run all workloads. Read the full Press Release from Oracle here.
Oracle Demonstrates Strategic Commitment to Data Privacy and Sovereignty with EU Sovereign Cloud Launch
Analyst Take: Oracle debuts its new EU Sovereign Cloud located entirely within the EU, supported by EU-based personnel, and operated by separate legal entities incorporated within the EU. Integral to OCI’s distributed cloud strategy, EU Sovereign Cloud is ready to provide a new option to fulfill regulatory requirements, augmenting EU-wide hybrid and dedicated cloud strategies.
Available for customers in all 27 member states of the EU and globally, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud offers 100+ cloud services available in Oracle’s public cloud with no premium fees for the sovereignty capabilities, and with the same SLAs on performance, management, and availability. Oracle customers can also gain access to other customer programs such as Oracle Support Rewards. In addition, Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, which is currently available in the EU Restricted Access (EURA) offering, is planned to be available in the Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud soon.
Specifically, the Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud data centers are in Frankfurt, Germany and Madrid, Spain, and they are owned and operated by separate Oracle-owned EU legal entities incorporated within the EU, with operations and customer support restricted to EU-based personnel. Additionally, OCI’s network of more than 85 global and regional OCI FastConnect partners offers organizations dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud Regions and OCI services. Digital Realty is the host partner for the EU Sovereign Cloud region location in Madrid, and Equinix is the host partner for the region location in Frankfurt. FastConnect partners available at launch include Arelion, DE-CIX, Digital Realty, Equinix, and InterCloud.
The EU Sovereign Cloud is separate from Oracle’s other cloud regions with the goal of giving customers more control of their data. I find the new offering is well suited to host digital businesses operating across intensely regulated industries. As such, customers with data and applications that are sensitive, regulated, or of strategic regional importance, as well as workloads that are under EU jurisdiction, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can now move safely to the cloud.
Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud: Enables Organizations to Securely Adopt Key Applications
In my assessment, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud can aid organizations in regulated industries and governments adopt fast evolving AI techniques such as generative AI. Organizations have faced barriers that prevented the use of existing generative AI offerings. This includes data residency and regulatory requirements precluding them from using AI infrastructure in the public cloud to develop the models required for generative AI. By offering the services and capabilities of Oracle’s public cloud, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud can enable public sector organizations to use AI infrastructure in a cloud that aligns with EU data residency and sovereignty requirements.
Moreover, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud is positioned to help accelerate adoption of key cloud applications across the EU. For example, the OCI content delivery network (CDN) platform can provide a formidable competitive alternative to established CDNs such as Akamai and Cloudflare.
OCI directly targets the confidential computing segment by offering availability of OCI Compute shapes with AMD, including E4 Flex, E4 Bare Metal Standard, and E3 Bare Metal Standard, using AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME). I anticipate that confidential computing will gain greater traction and influence across EU cloud security environments since the technology protects data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE).
To help customers further secure their data and address data sovereignty requirements, OCI is introducing two new key management services available across all Oracle Cloud Regions, including EU Sovereign Cloud: OCI Dedicated Key Management Service and OCI External Key Management Service.
OCI External Key Management is built in partnership with the Thales Group and lets customers encrypt their data using encryption keys that are created and managed by the customer outside of OCI. These encryption keys always stay within custody of the customer and are never imported into OCI, enabling customers to move regulated workloads to OCI that require control over the physical storage of keys outside the cloud. OCI Dedicated Key Management gives customers control over their encryption keys by using a dedicated, single-tenant hardware security module (HSM) provisioned within OCI.
From my view, Oracle is outflanking its hyperscaler rivals, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with EU Sovereign Cloud. Such rivals address the EU market by offering logical separation of traffic, which typically includes charging extra for a discrete policy or encryption key to attain data sovereignty. In stark contrast, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud provides an extra layer of physical separation backed by the assurance that only EU-based personnel handle the workloads with operations administered by separate EU legal entities at no extra cost.
Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud: Advancing Oracle’s Distributed Cloud Strategy
Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud expands the choices offered by OCI’s distributed cloud delivering cloud services to designated locations with flexible performance, security, EU-specific compliance, and operational models. OCI’s distributed cloud includes 44 commercial and government regions in 23 countries, services that enable multicloud architectures and interworking, Exadata Cloud@Customer, and other hybrid cloud offerings delivered to customer data centers in over 60 countries, as well as dedicated cloud regions operated for government and business customers.
As such, I find that a distributed cloud strategy with sovereign cloud deployment options is the optimal approach to fulfill the various needs of customers with global presence, as Oracle has demonstrated through its strategic development of its sovereign and distributed capabilities.
Key Takeaways: Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud Debut
With the EU Sovereign Cloud launch advancing its distributed cloud strategy, I believe that Oracle is the only hyperscaler to literally offer every single one of its hundreds of cloud services in the deployment model and location that a customer selects. Whereas other hyperscalers essentially assert “you must come to my public cloud for the best services,” Oracle brings its best services directly to customers as proven through the Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud debut.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
