BT to offer secure, private network connection into Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud customers will soon be able to exchange data with their on-premise environments via a virtual private network connection, courtesy of BT.

The two companies have struck a deal that will see the telco provide a direct and private connection to Oracle’s cloud datacentres in Amsterdam and London, via its BT Connect service, sometime during the final quarter of 2016.

The offering forms part of BT’s ongoing bid to position itself as a cloud integrator that can provide enterprises with access to a wide range of off-premise apps and services from various providers.

By adding Oracle Cloud to the roll-call of off-premise environments BT Connect gives them access to, the telco said its aim is to protect users from the latency and performance issues that sometimes blight the delivery cloud services over public internet connections.

Diby Malakar, vice-president of product management at Oracle, said the partnership should provide enterprise customers that want to do more and move faster into its cloud.  

“Cloud is the fastest-growing part of Oracle’s business, and the reason why this partnership is important is that it will enable our customers that want to move more of their workloads to the Oracle cloud,” he told Computer Weekly.

“This will essentially help customers overcome the unpredictable nature of the internet as this partnership with BT will provide high-speed connectivity. This means customers can predictably and consistently exchange large quantities of data between the private and public cloud.”

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Keith Langridge, vice-president of network services at BT, said enterprise interest in private cloud connections is growing, as firms look to shift more of their business critical workloads to the cloud.

“What we’ve been finding is our customers are saying, ‘we used to use your networks to connect to our users and software systems we were running in our datacentres, but increasingly we want to connect to cloud services’. This is because customers want to consume cloud services on a more flexible basis,” he said.

According to Oracle’s data, its cloud is used by more than 70 million people and houses more than 34 billion transactions every day.

“As they move to the cloud, the key thing they’re interested in is maintaining the same user performance as they take cloud-based services from companies such as Oracle, instead of running Oracle software on servers in their own datacentres,” said Langridge.