Oracle claims major win in Australian public sector

Australian Data Centres (ADC) will be deploying Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to host cloud services for the federal government and meet data sovereignty and security requirements.

Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer lets enterprises host an entire cloud region in their own datacentre facility, which in the case of ADC, is located in Canberra where government workloads in national security, health and other services that deal with sensitive data are run.

Through the Oracle managed service, ADC will be able access all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including software-as-a-service applications, bare metal compute, autonomous database, as well as container-based services while maintaining control and governance of their systems and services.

Launched last year, Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer was a radical move by Oracle to meet the needs of governments and regulated industries that want all the benefits of public cloud, including global roll-outs of software upgrades and patches, while meeting data residency and latency requirements.

“Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer makes it easier for government entities to securely move to the next stage of their cloud-enabled transformation,” said Cherie Ryan, Oracle’s vice-president and regional managing director for Australia and New Zealand.

“It builds on our strong momentum in the Canberra market and provides the equivalent of a third Australian cloud region, complementing our existing investments in second-generation cloud regions in Melbourne and Sydney.”

ADC is a private and wholly owned-and-operated Australian company which hosts several Commonwealth departmental tenants in its tier-three datacentre, along with their gateways, as well as several Australian international telecommunications companies and commercial organisations.

“We are committed to building capacity to provide services to the government by Australian providers to assure both the security and reliability of the supply chain,” said Rob Kelly, managing director of ADC.

“This is a major step toward enabling more choice for government to access world-leading cloud services, in a datacentre managed by a 100% Australian sovereign company, focused on connectivity, security, and simplified deployment. Critically, it addresses data hosting sovereignty, enhanced security and performance attributes required to accelerate the government’s shift to cloud services.”

Oracle’s latest win comes at a time when both local and global cloud service providers are jostling for a slice of Australia’s public sector business.

In June 2020, Macquarie started gearing up for growing demand for cloud and cyber security services from its government customers with a new tier-four datacentre in Canberra. When completed, the full Canberra campus will have 4MW of capacity, with additional capacity to expand further if required.

Microsoft also opened two Azure cloud regions in 2018 that are hosted by Australian-owned Canberra Data Centres to handle protected and unclassified government data. Government agencies using the Intra Government Communications Network can directly connect to Azure in Canberra.