On December 15, it was officially Inauguration of Oracle’s first Italian cloud region. The Region has indeed been active since the end of November, as we had anticipated here, and some customers have been relying on this infrastructure for a few weeks already, but the multinational has decided today to officially “unveil” the 36th Cloud Region, located in Milan , considered the industrial and economic heart of the Bel Paese.
With that of Milan, another European Region has also appeared, that of stockholmwhich is added to those already present on the Old Continent: Frankfurt, AAmsterdam and Marseilles, London, Newport, Wales, Zurich.
Oracle opens the Milan Cloud Region, the first in Italy: what changes for customers?
“It is important to offer Italian organizations access to the cloud infrastructure located in the country to manage their most critical applications and data. We are currently seeing significant growth in our cloud business, reflecting the desire of our customers to digitize quickly their operations to better serve their customers“, explain Alexandre Hippolytevice president and national general manager of Oracle. “In addition, the Milan region will also be able to support the initiatives of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which aims to promote Italy’s economic recovery by taking advantage of digital modernization. Having a Cloud region on Italian soil will facilitate the adoption of Cloud services by government agencies and companies operating in the most strictly regulated sectors.
But what are the benefits for users in practice? Migrating workloads to the Italian infrastructure has two main advantages. The first is technical: being the servers closest to the companies that process the data, the latency will be much lower than what can be obtained by relying on other European Regions. But there is also a “political” aspect, perhaps even more important: data sovereignty. If for some companies this may seem like a marginal problem, for companies that operate in areas such as finance or health, it is essential that the data physically resides in Italy. Someone might argue that the infrastructure remains in the hands of Oracle, an American multinational that must comply with the Cloud Act, but the company has implemented solutions to prevent this from becoming a problem, such as Bring your own key (BYOK): The cryptographic keys remain in the hands of the customers, and therefore neither Oracle nor the US government would have any way of accessing the information.
Not Oracle: the future is multi-cloud
Oracle does not claim to be the only cloud service provider for its customers and has entered into a partnership with Microsoft that enables joint customers to operate workloads on Oracle Cloud and Azure, leveraging an interconnect Low-latency cross-cloud between OCI and Azure in eight select regions. Thanks to this agreement, users will be able to create applications based on both infrastructures, while maintaining high performance connectivity. The importance of multi-cloud is highlighted by Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, CEO of Noovle (a TIM Group company that builds an all-Italian cloud infrastructure): “Noovle considers Oracle as a relevant partner for MultiCloud solutions. The presence in Italian companies and public administration makes Oracle an important element in the country’s digitalization process. The opening of the Italian Region confirms the importance Oracle places on our country. The collaboration between Noovle and Oracle will benefit from this openness, in order to jointly promote flexibility, openness and portability of data by offering the most suitable MultiCloud environments for each customer and situation.”.
Customer testimonials
Some Oracle customers have already started to rely on the Italian cloud region, and among these are Trenord and ATM, the two companies operating in Lombardy, which for all intents and purposes have brought data home , with offices in Milan, therefore as close as possible to the Oracle infrastructure.
“In 2017, Trenord launched a strategy to renew and consolidate its infrastructure towards cloud solutions, immediately choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services for its entire ticketing platform, in order to guarantee high performance in a secure, innovative way. and sustainable.“, explain Marcella SchaviTrenord IT manager. “Today, the choice is renewed with ATM, to jointly provide the new services of the SBE (Electronic Ticketing System) consortium. Having a cloud region in Milan available today therefore gives us new opportunities to scale to the cloud with low latency, thanks to proximity, and gives us further confirmation that we have made the right decision, to focus on customer experience and data security.”.