Oracle opens second cloud region in Brazil

Oracle on Wednesday announced that its second Brazilian cloud region is live in Vinhedo, a city in the state of Sao Paolo. With this launch, Oracle's Gen2 Cloud will be available in 30 locations. The tech giant is on track to have a total of 38 cloud regions up and running by the end of this year. 

The new region makes Oracle the only cloud provider with two regions in Brazil. Oracle has had a presence in Brazil since last year, when it launched its first Sao Paulo region.

Oracle's goal is to build at least two regions in most countries where it operates cloud infrastructure. That redundancy is valuable for disaster recovery purposes, as well as for helping enterprises meet data residency requirements. The idea is to give more confidence to business customers thinking about moving critical systems to the cloud.

"We have a set of requirements to ensure we're providing the highest levels from an availability perspective and a scale perspective that can meet our needs and the needs of our customers," Oracle CIO Jae Evans said to ZDNet. 

The Vinhedo Cloud region is also home to the latest Oracle-Microsoft Azure Interconnect. Oracle and Microsoft launched their interoperability partnership in 2019 and already have six live interconnects in London; Amsterdam; Montreal; Tokyo; San Jose, CA; and Ashburn, Virginia. The Oracle-Azure partnership is part of Oracle's expanding portfolio of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud initiatives. 

Earlier this year, Oracle announced that TIM Brasil, Brazil's largest telecom provider, would leverage the interconnect as part of its plan to migrate all of its on-premises workloads to the cloud. 

In addition to TIM Brasil, some of Oracle's customers in Brazil include Rumo Logistics and Drogaria Pharma Sao Paulo. 

Oracle now has multiple cloud regions in eight countries. In addition to Brazil, that includes the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, the UK and Australia. Oracle also has mulitple regions within the European Union. 

The eight cloud regions slated to come online this year include second regions in UAE and Saudi Arabia, additional EU regions in Italy, Sweden, and France; as well as new regions in Singapore, South Africa, and Israel. 

Oracle has pitched its Gen2 Cloud as purpose-built for the enterprise, but the company remains a niche infrastructure provider, with a fraction of the market share held by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Oracle has been landing new customers with its expanding cloud infrastructure, but it can also appeal to existing customers, thanks to its strength in database and enterprise applications.