Where In The World Is Your Data?

The demand for enterprise-grade cloud systems is not just growing in the United States; the need for cloud services has gone global. Oracle has responded to this demand by building four new data centers abroad, in Germany and Canada. These new additions will bring the total number of data centers that host Oracle services in the cloud to 17, according to V3, the British technology magazine.

Oracle is expanding for two main reasons: customer demand and legal compliance. Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, says the global expansion is necessary to continue delivering the most efficient, enterprise-grade cloud-based services to customers. At present, the building of data centers is not moving fast enough to accommodate the worldwide popularity of cloud computing.

“Oracle operates a mission-critical cloud and we understand that cloud services need to deliver more than our already industry-leading breadth and depth of cloud-service functionality,” Hurd said to V3 on the need for the expansion.

In addition, cloud currently operates in a legal gray area in many countries. As data storage moves into the cloud, governments are struggling to define whose laws apply to data: is it the laws of the place where the data is stored or the laws of the place where the data is accessed? Cloud complicates these legal issues. Oracle builds its services around the idea that customers will never have to worry about compliance, because Oracle programs are built to work optimally in various regulatory environments.

“Oracle also delivers on the requirements of enterprise IT, including important corporate and regulatory requirements around data privacy and security. We are excited to announce this expansion as further commitment to our global customer base and their data residency requirements,” Hurd explained.

As the polices stand today, Oracle’s data centers would be subject to their local data residency and regulatory requirements, making their legal status clear to global customers. Oracle’s expansion of data centers on a global scale will provide an important knowledge base for public sector personnel on how each country’s legal system accounted for the unique nature of cloud storage. Many government agencies worldwide already partner with Oracle, this global data center expansion will make those partnerships even more seamless.

If you are using the cloud, do you know where your agency’s data centers are located? Would your government agency permit data to be stored in a data center abroad? How does your agency deal with the legal issues of cloud?

Oracle offers an optimized and fully integrated stack of business hardware and software systems that helps organizations overcome complexity and unleash innovation.. Check out their Optimize with Oracle group on GovLoop as well as the Technology Sub-Community of which they are a council member.