Interview: How Oracle plans to bring the public cloud to companies’ on-premise data centers

• The tech giant states that its OCI Dedicated Region enables enterprises to gain the full functionality of Oracle’s public cloud in the locations of their choice, including their own data centers.
• Our aim is to provide a plug-and-play public cloud experience, on a pay-as-you-use model that allows customers to innovate faster, reduce time-to-market and stay agile, says Srikanth Doranadula, VP- Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India.

End-user spending on public cloud services in India is expected to reach $7.3 billion this year, according to Gartner, notching an impressive 30 percent growth over last year.


Cloud adoption, including hybrid and multi-cloud models, has been expanding fast among all kinds of companies globally. The pandemic further strengthened the case for cloud adoption with a large majority of organizations moving quickly to cloud to respond to the crisis. Agility, elasticity and digital transformation imperatives are just some of the many reasons why businesses move to cloud.


For many regulated industries and public sector companies, the story has been slightly different. Stringent compliance requirements, data sovereignty demands, latency concerns and a host of unique requirements has meant that these organizations take a measured approach to cloud – specifically to public cloud.


“Regulated industries such as banking have moved an increasing number of periphery applications and workloads to the public cloud, but the core systems still remain on premises. And it’s going to remain so as they want complete control over their critical data due to reasons varying from data security to data sovereignty to latency,” says Srikanth Doranadula, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India.


While regulated industries have migrated several of their non-core systems of engagement (SOE) to the public cloud, their systems of record (SORs) remain on-premise, in their own data centers, according to Doranadula.


Nevertheless, Oracle sees a unique market opportunity here – to bring the experience of public cloud to these organisations’ on-premise data centers, and provide them with the benefits of a public cloud while placing it behind their firewall for better security and control. The company’s recent announcement around Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region underpins this strategy.


With OCI Dedicated Region, claims the company, enterprise customers can gain the full functionality of Oracle’s public cloud in the locations of their choice, including their own data centers.


“Imagine if a bank that relies largely on its on-premise data center were to launch a major blockchain initiative. It would require them to deploy and provision specialised hardware and software in their dedicated data centers, leading to a significant amount of investment, effort and resources,” Doranadula said.


“Our aim is to provide a plug-and-play public cloud experience, on a pay-as-you-use model that allows customers to innovate faster, reduce time-to-market and stay agile while leveraging the power of cloud elasticity.”


By 2024, 60 percent of organisations are predicted to implement dedicated cloud services either on premises or in a service provider facility in response to performance, security, and compliance requirements. Many organisations are therefore taking a hybrid multi-cloud approach.

This is one trend that Oracle believes will impact organisations’ cloud consumption strategies in the coming days. Doranadula reiterated that the hybrid cloud model was here to stay and would be a larger part of the market. And this is not true of regulated industries alone. Several organisations in unregulated industries – telecom companies, conglomerates, systems integrators etc. – with unique computing needs are opting for hybrid models, he said.

These shifting models are parallelly driving up the need for distributed cloud computing in the industry, especially with the advent of 5G and edge computing. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for example, offers distributed cloud options with hybrid cloud services and multi-cloud capabilities across 38 public cloud regions worldwide.


“We believe that distributed cloud is the next evolution of cloud computing, and it provides customers with much more flexibility and control in how they deploy cloud resources. The emerging hybrid and distributed cloud models such as ours removes cloud adoption barriers like data sovereignty, data residency, or latency for enterprises,” said Doranadula.