Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Archives - Page 4 of 9

Rethinking Digital Sovereignty – From Decentralized Control to a “Cloud NATO” for Europe

Jul 12, 2025 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer, Sovereign Cloud

Cloud infrastructure has quietly become one of the most strategic layers of modern sovereignty. The ability to store, process, and control data within national or regional boundaries isn’t just a regulatory preference anymore. It’s a matter of economic security, political leverage, and systemic resilience.

Across Europe, the pressure is mounting to find alternatives to centralized cloud dependencies, especially on non-European hyperscalers. But the response doesn’t have to be isolation or reinvention. A new kind of architecture is emerging, one that combines local control with collective strength.

This article explores two major ideas driving the conversation forward: decentralized digital sovereignty and the potential for a NATO-style model of cloud governance. It also looks at how Oracle Cloud aligns with this vision as a modular enabler of sovereignty, interoperability, and trust.

The Shift Toward Decentralized Sovereignty

When digital sovereignty first entered the mainstream conversation, it was often framed in binary terms: own the stack, or remain dependent. Control your cloud, or get locked in. But real-world infrastructure isn’t built on such clean lines. Across Europe, what’s emerging is a decentralized approach to sovereignty – one that accepts technical diversity, regulatory pluralism, and federated execution.

A decentralized model doesn’t reject sovereignty, it redefines it. Each country, or even each sector, can set and enforce its own policies around data protection, infrastructure, and compliance. But instead of operating in isolation, these systems connect through shared governance, open standards, and secure interoperability. It’s not about building a pan-European hyperscaler but about creating a European cloud ecosystem.

This is the principle behind initiatives like Gaia‑X, which doesn’t aim to replace existing infrastructure, but rather to standardize how participants exchange data, certify services, and establish trust. It’s sovereignty is maintained at the edge, but coordinated at the core.

This model is particularly well-suited to the European context, where data protection laws like the GDPR already offer a common legal framework, but where political and operational control must remain localized. Sovereignty, in this sense, becomes a set of enforceable guarantees, not a monolithic stack.

From Decentralization to Collective Defense – A “Cloud NATO”?

Decentralized control brings autonomy, but what about defense? In a digital world, resilience isn’t just about uptime. It’s about coordination. Europe needs to think beyond who hosts the data and start asking how we defend, recover, and coordinate our digital responses as a unified front.

The idea of a “Cloud NATO” is more than a metaphor. Like its military counterpart, it would be built on the principle of shared responsibility with local autonomy. Each country would operate its own cloud environment: certified, secured, and governed by its own rules. But all participants would align on common protocols for interoperability, auditing, security standards, and incident response.

Think of it as a federation of sovereign clouds: decentralized in ownership, but unified in execution when needed. Such a model would preserve the diversity of national approaches and offer a collective backbone for coordination and trust.

In moments of crisis, whether regulatory, technical, or geopolitical, a NATO-style alliance would allow sovereign clouds to mutually support each other, share threat intelligence, and even mirror critical workloads across trusted jurisdictions. In a time of rising cyber threats, digital fragmentation is not an option, but neither is centralization. A federated alliance may be the only workable path.

Where Oracle Cloud Fits In

To make these models viable, Europe needs cloud providers that don’t force one mode of operation. It needs platforms that support sovereignty by design, federation by architecture, and trust by default. Oracle Cloud brings several elements to this table.

Oracle offers one of the most modular and flexible cloud deployment models in the hyperscaler landscape. With Dedicated Region and Cloud@Customer, Oracle enables governments and critical industries to deploy full-featured Oracle Cloud environments within national borders or sovereign facilities. That means local control over infrastructure, compliance, and operations- without giving up cloud-native scalability or modern service architectures.

Crucially, Oracle’s architecture emphasizes openness. It supports Kubernetes, open APIs, and multi-cloud integrations, ensuring sovereign environments aren’t isolated silos but nodes in a larger ecosystem. Whether connecting ministries across borders or bridging data domains between sectors, this openness makes decentralized coordination feasible at scale.

Building Blocks for a “Cloud NATO”

For a federated governance model to work, interoperability isn’t enough. Providers must support auditable governance, strong identity management, transparent encryption controls, and legal separation of sovereign workloads. Oracle’s EU Sovereign Cloud does exactly that: operating independently from its global infrastructure, with EU-based support, operations, and compliance.

Oracle also demonstrates multi-cloud execution through its partnership with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, where Oracle Database services run natively in Azure, AWS or GCP data centers. It’s a working example of what a trusted, cross-platform alliance can look like. Tech giants respect the sovereignty of each other’s platforms while delivering real interoperability.

These technical capabilities are supported by a broader strategy: Oracle doesn’t push for lock-in or exclusive dependencies. It supports coexistence and federation. The very principles that would make a “Cloud NATO” not just possible, but resilient.

Sovereignty Is Evolving. So Should the Cloud

The old model of sovereignty – one state, one data center, one stack – is no longer viable. Europe needs an approach to cloud that is both locally governed and globally coordinated.

Decentralized sovereignty gives each country the autonomy it needs. A “Cloud NATO” gives the continent the collective strength it lacks. Together, they offer a roadmap not just for compliance, but for cloud independence with integrity.

And for this to work, cloud providers must be more than platforms, they must be partners in sovereignty. Oracle’s architecture, deployment flexibility, and governance tooling place it in a unique position to support this shift. Not by dominating the stack, but by enabling distributed trust.

The future of Europe’s cloud may not belong to a single player. It may belong to an alliance.

5 Challenges in Building National Cloud Infrastructures and How to Solve Them

Jul 10, 2025 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Sovereign Cloud

Governments around the world are facing increasing pressure to assert control over their digital infrastructure. Whether driven by regulatory mandates, national security concerns, or political developments, the concept of a national cloud or sovereign cloud is gaining serious traction.

But building a national cloud infrastructure is far from straightforward. It is a complex balancing act between innovation, control, compliance, and risk management. Based on my work in the cloud space across Oracle and VMware, and through conversations with customers in the public sector, I have seen the same set of challenges come up again and again.

In this post, I want to walk through five of the biggest challenges governments and regulated industries face when building sovereign cloud environments, and explore some practical ways to solve them.

1. The Data Sovereignty Dilemma

One of the most fundamental challenges is ensuring data remains under the control of the nation that owns it. Most global cloud providers are headquartered in the US and are subject to extraterritorial laws, such as the CLOUD Act. That’s a serious concern for countries in the EU, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific who require sensitive data to remain on national or regional soil, with no foreign access.

Saying that “data is stored in Frankfurt” doesn’t automatically mean it’s sovereign. True data sovereignty requires not only residency, but also legal and operational separation from foreign jurisdictions. This is where traditional hyperscale models fall short.

To address this, vendors like Oracle have started offering sovereign cloud regions – such as the Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud – which are operated and supported entirely from within the EU, by EU-based personnel. That is a major step forward. But ultimately, sovereignty isn’t just a location, it’s an operating model. You need to design the cloud platform from day one with jurisdictional independence and compliance in mind.

2. Securing National-Scale Cloud Platforms

Security is always important in cloud architecture, but when you are talking about a national cloud, the stakes are even higher. You are dealing with mission-critical applications, citizen data, defense information, or classified intelligence systems. A breach or compromise isn’t just a technical issue, it’s a national event.

Unfortunately, many government environments still rely on legacy perimeter models and lack deep cloud-native security architecture. The challenge is how to build a cloud environment that meets zero-trust standards, supports high-assurance workloads, and integrates with national cybersecurity frameworks.

The answer lies in combining hardened cloud regions, private connectivity, data encryption with customer-controlled keys, and isolation mechanisms such as dedicated tenancy or confidential computing. Platforms like Oracle’s National Security Regions (NSRs) offer this level of separation and assurance. But even then, security isn’t just about tools. It’s about governance. Governments must define strict policies and enforce them consistently across cloud and on-prem environments.

3. Operational Control and Cloud Autonomy

A common concern I hear from public sector architects is the fear of losing operational control. Many cloud services are abstracted to a point where customers can’t dictate how and where they run. For governments, that’s not always acceptable. Especially when they want to run critical workloads or classified systems.

There’s a growing demand for operational autonomy: the ability to manage, monitor, and maintain the infrastructure independently or through trusted local entities. This is where concepts like “sovereign operations” come into play.

In a sovereign cloud model, operations – including support, monitoring, and incident response – are handled within the national boundary, by vetted personnel. Oracle has implemented this model in its EU Sovereign Cloud, ensuring no foreign nationals are involved in the operational chain. It is this level of people-based sovereignty, not just technology, that defines real national cloud infrastructure.

4. Keeping Up with the Compliance Maze

Compliance is one of the biggest drivers behind national cloud initiatives, and also one of the most frustrating challenges. The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving. Governments must comply with GDPR, national data protection laws, critical infrastructure regulations, defense policies, and sector-specific standards.

But cloud platforms evolve faster than laws do. It’s hard to maintain compliance across services, especially when new features are released weekly and spread across different regions.

One way to address this is by using compliance automation frameworks. Cloud providers like Oracle offer templates and reference architectures that help you deploy workloads in a compliant-by-default manner. Some even include compliance-as-code, which automates controls and checks during the deployment process.

But even the best frameworks won’t help unless your cloud provider aligns its service roadmap with local regulations. That’s why it’s essential to work with vendors who treat compliance not as a checkbox, but as a core part of their product design and go-to-market strategy.

5. Innovation vs. Risk Aversion

The final challenge is cultural, not technical.

Most public sector organizations know they need to modernize, but they operate in environments where risk is avoided at all costs. Innovation often takes a backseat to auditability and procurement processes. As a result, cloud transformation projects get stuck in POCs, or never leave the pilot phase.

Ironically, sovereign clouds are often seen as “less capable” than commercial regions, reinforcing this hesitance. But that perception is changing. Today, sovereign cloud offerings are increasingly on par with global platforms. And in some cases, they offer more control and greater visibility.

To overcome internal resistance, governments need to create safe innovation spaces. That means using pre-certified landing zones, sandbox environments, and trusted architectural patterns. It also means investing in cloud fluency across teams, so that risk management and agility aren’t mutually exclusive.

Note: “Cloud fluency” refers to the ability of individuals or organizations to understand, use, and make informed decisions about cloud technologies, confidently and effectively.

Final Thoughts

Building a national cloud infrastructure isn’t just a technical project. I’s a long-term strategic effort that combines technology, law, policy, and trust. The challenges are significant, but solvable, especially if they’re tackled early and with the right partners.

Whether it’s data sovereignty, security assurance, operational control, or compliance, governments need platforms that are sovereign-by-design, not just sovereign in name. And vendors need to step up with credible solutions that support national priorities without compromising cloud innovation.

Sovereign cloud is no longer a niche requirement. It’s a mainstream architectural model and one that will shape the next decade of public sector IT strategy.

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated – Sovereign Public Sector Hosting for Oracle Partners

Jul 7, 2025 | OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle Alloy, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer, Sovereign Cloud

Across Europe, public sector organisations are under increasing pressure to modernise their IT environments while maintaining full control over data, infrastructure, and operations. This is where Oracle partners can step in. With Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated (C3I), they now have the opportunity to offer sovereign cloud hosting services tailored to the needs of governments and regulated industries.

Oracle’s approach to digital sovereignty is not abstract. It is based on clearly defined principles that are embedded in the platform itself. With C3I, data – whether user data, metadata, or telemetry -remains entirely within the customer’s environment. Nothing is transmitted back to Oracle. The complete OCI control plane runs locally, fully disconnected from Oracle’s global infrastructure. This ensures that compliance requirements can be met without compromise.

Transparency and control are fundamental. There is no ongoing operator access to the system because C3I is an air-gapped, disconnected solution. Once installed, Oracle has no remote access to the environment. The installation and activation – including any expansion, such as GPU or storage racks – is handled on-site by Oracle’s field team. Ongoing operations, monitoring, and support are managed entirely by the hosting service provider (HSP), not by Oracle. Customers define their access policies, manage their own encryption keys, and control every layer of the platform.

Unlike traditional hosted solutions, C3I delivers the full Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) IaaS portfolio, along with key platform services such as Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), all deployed within the HSP’s own data centre. This empowers Oracle Partners to offer modern, cloud-native infrastructure and container services to public-sector tenants, while keeping everything firmly under local control and governance.

What Makes C3I a Game‑Changer?

Besides OCI Dedicated Region, Alloy, and Oracle Isolated Cloud Region, C3I is Oracle’s most secure and sovereign cloud deployment model. One of the main drivers for adopting Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated is the need to run classified workloads in fully isolated environments. In this context, governments with strict regulations, ministries of defense, and intelligence services represent the key targeted customers.

What sets C3I apart is that its architecture is the entire control plane, the brain of OCI, is deployed inside the partner’s (or customer’s) premises. Again, there is no connection to Oracle’s public cloud regions, no shared management layer, and no external operator access. Once the system is installed, Oracle no longer has access. There is no remote telemetry, no persistent administrator credentials, and no automated updates. Every action, including patching, must be initiated and approved by the partner’s operators.

Despite its strict isolation, C3I delivers the same developer experience as the public cloud. Users can work with the same APIs, tools, and automation workflows. All core OCI services are available, from compute and storage to networking and IAM. This makes it possible to run modern applications, automate deployments, and enforce security policies. Just like in the public cloud, but with full control.

For Oracle partners, this opens new doors.

Hosting Multiple Tenants with IAM and Compartment Isolation

To serve multiple tenants on shared C3I infrastructure, Oracle relies on the strength of its Identity and Access Management (IAM) framework. Each tenant is hosted in a dedicated compartment, which acts as a logical and administrative boundary. Resources are isolated, policies are scoped, and access is strictly defined. IAM ensures that each tenant sees only what they are supposed to see and nothing more.

With compartments, policies, and groups, providers can implement fine-grained access control while still maintaining a clear operational model.

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Hosting Service Provider Model

On the networking side, Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs) are provisioned per tenant. If connectivity is required between VCNs – let’s say, for shared services or for intercommunication – Dynamic Routing Gateways (DRGs) are used to establish secure and controlled interconnections. This approach allows for scalable, tenant-aware architectures without compromising performance or sovereignty.

C3I is Ready for AI – GPU Expansion Racks

C3I is not just built for traditional workloads. It is also designed to support next-generation applications, including those that require hardware acceleration. Currently, through dedicated GPU expansion racks, Oracle partners can add up to 48 NVIDIA L40S GPUs to a single C3I deployment. These GPUs are integrated into the system’s high-speed network and storage architecture, making them available to tenants just like any other OCI resource.

This capability allows Hosting Service Providers to offer GPU-as-a-Service directly to public-sector clients – ideal for AI, ML, and data analytics workloads that must remain within national borders. All resources are managed through the same local OCI control plane, keeping everything under the same compliance and operational framework.

The sensitive nature of government data demands absolute sovereignty. With Oracle C3I, sovereign AI becomes a reality.

Red Hat OpenShift Support

For Oracle Partners hosting public sector tenants on C3I, delivering enterprise-grade container platforms is critical. That’s why C3I fully supports Red Hat OpenShift, enabling end-customers to run their containerized workloads with confidence and flexibility.

OpenShift brings a comprehensive Kubernetes-based platform with advanced features like developer tools, integrated CI/CD pipelines, and robust security controls. By running OpenShift on C3I, customers benefit from a sovereign, isolated environment that meets strict regulatory demands, while leveraging the rich ecosystem and productivity of Red Hat’s market-leading container platform.

A Sovereign Platform That Grows With You

C3I starts with a strong baseline: 552 cores, 6.7 TB of RAM, and 150 TB of storage. But it doesn’t stop there. The platform can scale to 6’072 cores, 73.7 TB of memory, 3.65 Petabytes of high-capacity storage, and 1.2 Petabytes of high-performance storage.

Unlocking a New Business Model for Oracle Partners

For Oracle Partners, C3I creates a new type of service opportunity. Instead of simply reselling cloud subscriptions, they can operate a sovereign cloud environment, offering secure, isolated, and scalable hosting to public sector clients. It is a cloud environment you can trust, built for those who need to guarantee data residency and operational autonomy.

With C3I, Oracle provides the tools. Now it is time for partners to build the services.

Rethinking Digital Sovereignty – A Response to the Public Cloud Critique

Jul 3, 2025 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer, Sovereign Cloud

I understand it, believe me. The public cloud promised a lot: speed, scale, flexibility. But over time, cracks have appeared. Bills grow faster than workloads and compliance becomes harder, not easier. And some applications never really fit, especially those that demand low latency or strict control.

So, we are told, companies are pulling workloads back from the public cloud. These reverse cloud migrations are also known as cloud repatriation. You have to understand, it is not a reversal of digital transformation and the abandoning of public cloud – it’s a correction. A realignment based on experience, governance needs, and financial pressure.

But the answer isn’t to go backward, if your expectations have not been met. The challenge is to retain the benefits of the cloud – automation, elasticity, operational efficiency – while regaining the control that is often lost in the public model.

But moving away from the cloud doesn’t mean giving up the cloud. The real question is: how do we keep what worked and fix what didn’t?

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) was built precisely for that purpose. It brings Oracle’s public cloud infrastructure and tooling into your data center, under your governance, with the same APIs, security, and operational model. What follows is how C3 directly addresses the core reasons driving repatriation and why many enterprises are choosing a more strategic hybrid path forward. C3 changes everything.

Cost Control Without Surprises

Ask any IT leader what drove their move to the cloud, and chances are “cost savings” is on the list. Ask them what drove them back, and they will likely say “cost surprises.” 🙂

Public cloud can scale, but it also scales your bill. Between data egress fees, idle VM costs, and unpredictable licensing, many organizations find their cloud TCO spiraling. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer in this scenario, changes the equation. It delivers the OCI experience on-premises, in a consumption-based OpEx model, but with predictability built in. No data egress. No hidden costs. No guessing. Just clear, auditable resource usage within your own data center.

Performance Without Compromise

Latency is often a business risk. Trading platforms, AI inference, and high-speed transaction systems, they all demand millisecond or sub-millisecond responsiveness. But in the public cloud, compute and data are often separated across zones or regions.

With C3, you bring compute right to where your data lives. Ultra-low latency, high-throughput workloads no longer need to be shoehorned into far-off regions. The cloud comes to you and it is backed by high-performance storage, native GPU options, and OCI’s virtual cloud networking.

Data Sovereignty, Security & Compliance – Rebuilt for Reality

Oracle C3 provides on-premises infrastructure, fully managed by Oracle, but entirely controlled by you. Data never leaves your facility unless you allow it. Access is managed through Operator Access Control, which gives you precise control over who can log in, when, and for what. Encryption at rest, in motion, and during access? Built in. Full audit trails? Native. That is the level of control regulators expect and enterprises now demand.

Governance, Visibility & Control

One of the hidden challenges of public cloud? Shadow IT. Teams spin up services without oversight, leading to risks in compliance, billing, and security posture.

With Oracle C3, everything runs within the bounds of your governance framework. You control IAM, compartmentalization, policy enforcement, tagging, metering, and quotas. It is the same control plane as OCI, so your security posture doesn’t depend on where the workload runs.

Operational Resilience You Actually Own

Let’s be honest: handing over infrastructure management can reduce operational overhead, but it can also mean giving up visibility, scheduling flexibility, and recovery control.

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer delivers the best of both worlds. Oracle manages the infrastructure lifecycle, from firmware updates to patching. But you define the maintenance windows, and the failover behaviour. DR scenarios, backup policies, hardware separation – they are yours to orchestrate.

What Is Operator Access Control?

Oracle Operator Access Control (OpCtl) is a feature used in products like Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) and Exadata Cloud@Customer, designed to give customers:

Explicit approval over Oracle’s administrative access
Time-bound, purpose-specific access windows
Comprehensive logging and session recording
Segregation of duties and multi-party authorization

So, before any Oracle operator can access the C3 environment for maintenance, updates, or troubleshooting, the customer must approve the request, define the time window, and scope the level of access permitted. All sessions are fully audited, with logs available to the customer for compliance and security reviews. This ensures that sensitive workloads and data remain under strict governance, aligning with zero-trust principles and regulatory requirements.

So, in practice, you can say:

“No one from Oracle can access my infrastructure unless I approve it, for a specific task, at a specific time.”

This is an excellent feature and tool for operational governance, auditability, and security assurance.

If you think about the U.S. CLOUD Act, then OpCtl, in my opinion, strengthens your legal and practical posture since you control the external access to the C3 systems. Additionally, you can provide proof and logs that no access occurred without your approval.

Let’s Think Differently. Give It A Try!

A Swiss professor recently outlined four conditions for digital sovereignty in the public cloud. The assumptions are valid, but they are also rooted in a narrow view of how the cloud has to work. If you want cloud, you have to give up control. And if you want sovereignty, you have to give up most of the cloud (services).

That binary thinking doesn’t hold up anymore. And it never should have.

Let’s be clear: digital sovereignty is not about avoiding cloud, it’s about deploying it on your terms. And that’s exactly what Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) enables as a third path (besides public cloud and repatriation).

Let’s take the arguments one by one.

1. “Only unmodified open source software ensures sovereignty”

Yes, I agree, open standards matter. But sovereignty isn’t just about code transparency. It’s about control over where software runs, how it’s operated, and who has access.

With C3, you run any open-source stack you want, inside your own data center. But more importantly, you also control the platform it runs on. Compute, storage, and networking stay within your facility, under your governance. You decide the architecture, the patch cycle, and the integrations. And you do it without giving up cloud automation, elasticity, or DevOps tooling.

2. “Internal know-how must be retained”

Agreed. Sovereignty without competence is meaningless.

C3 supports the same APIs, SDKs, Terraform modules, and CLI as the Oracle public cloud. That means your teams build skills once and apply them everywhere – on-premises, in the public cloud, or across hybrid landscapes.

You keep operational knowledge in-house. You train on real cloud-native patterns. And you run them on infrastructure that belongs to you.

3. “Avoid proprietary, specialized services”

This is where things get nuanced.

Most enterprises don’t want to avoid modern services. They just want freedom of movement (aka portability). With C3, you are not locked into proprietary ecosystems. You get the full Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stack but deployed in your data center, on infrastructure fully under your legal and physical control.

Because the environment is API-compatible with OCI, you are not locked in – you are portable by design. Move workloads to Oracle public regions. Or any other cloud. Or don’t. It is your choice. I would call that leverage.

4. “SaaS without data export is unacceptable”

Right again. Exit strategy matters.

C3 isn’t SaaS. It’s IaaS and PaaS delivered as a service inside your firewall. And because you control the storage, the networking, and the OS stack, you always retain the ability to export your data by using open formats, standard tools, and your own access policies.

Want to back up to another system? Build cross-platform failover? Disconnect from Oracle entirely? No problem. Your data stays in your hands.

Final Thought

Cloud repatriation is happening for good reasons. But walking away from cloud entirely isn’t the answer. The better move is to rethink where the cloud belongs and who’s in control of it.

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer gives you the cloud experience your teams want, with the sovereignty your business needs.

And today, that may be the one most strategic infrastructure choice you can make (besides Oracle’s EU Sovereign Cloud and Dedicated Cloud offerings).

If you are working in the public sector, have a look at this article: Enabling Public Sector Unity – How Oracle Alloy Could Power a Government Cloud and Cross-Agency Collaboration

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer – 10 IaaS Use Cases for SMBs

Jul 2, 2025 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer

Not every workload belongs in the public cloud. For small and mid-sized businesses, the reasons are often crystal clear: compliance, data residency, latency sensitivity, or the simple need for control.

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) brings the full Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) IaaS stack into your own data center. Same services. Same APIs. Same automation. Just under your roof.

So what does that mean in practice? Here are 10 concrete use cases where C3 delivers real value.

1. Regulatory Zone: Data Sovereignty Compute

Industries like healthcare, finance, and public services often can’t move regulated data off-prem. With C3, you get:

Compute: VMs and bare metal instances
Storage: Block, object, and file storage
Networking: VCNs, security lists, route tables, subnets
IAM: OCI-native identity policies and compartments

This stack runs entirely on-prem, ensuring compliance while giving you full elasticity and automation.

2. Edge Accelerator: Low-Latency AI/ML

AI/ML workloads at the edge demand local processing. With C3’s GPU-enabled compute shapes and fast local networking, you can:

Run inference or training close to where the data is generated
Use high-performance block storage for datasets
Leverage VCN and subnets for secure and segmented data flows

Perfect for industrial analytics, real-time decision-making, or imaging workloads that can’t wait for the cloud.

3. Legacy Modernizer: Lift-and-Shift Platform

Modernization doesn’t have to mean refactoring. Migrate your legacy systems onto OCI compute and storage services:

Compute: OCI-compatible VM shapes for Windows, Linux, and custom OS images
Block Storage: Persistent volumes with high IOPS
Networking: VCN, subnets, and security lists for segmentation
Automation: Terraform, CLI, SDKs for fully scripted provisioning

Your legacy stack gets modern infrastructure without cloud lock-in or rewrites.

4. Hybrid Bridge: Seamless Cloud Integration

C3 extends your OCI tenancy into your own environment, enabling true hybrid operations:

Networking: Site-to-site VPN or FastConnect
Compute & Storage Replication: Move workloads or data between C3 and OCI regions
Automation: Use OCI APIs, SDKs, or Terraform across both footprints

With shared identity, policies, and tooling, C3 makes hybrid cloud feel like one seamless platform.

5. DevOps Sandbox: On-Prem CI/CD Pipelines

Dev teams benefit from production-like test environments – C3 provides them:

Compute: Ephemeral or persistent VM shapes for test environments
Object Storage: Store build artifacts, container images, or logs
VCNs: Isolate test networks for security
Automation: Run pipelines with familiar OCI SDKs, CLI, and Terraform

Test, deploy, and iterate locally with the same tools you use in OCI.

6. Secure Multi-Tenant: Departmental or Customer Isolation

Multi-tenancy is built into C3 with OCI’s native controls:

VCNs & Subnets: Logical separation of environments
Security Lists & NSGs: Define granular traffic rules
IAM: Fine-grained access controls per team, tenant, or department
Compartments: Organizational units for governance and billing

Whether you are a service provider or just segmenting business units, it’s multi-tenant by design.

7. Disaster Recovery Node: Local DR Site

Use C3 as a fast, local disaster recovery target:

Block Storage: Replicate volumes from primary sites
Compute: Pre-provision failover VM templates
Networking: Keep standby environments isolated until needed
Automation: Use OCI APIs or CLI to orchestrate recovery steps

C3 gives you a DR solution with minimal latency, full control, and no third-party dependencies.

8. SaaS Host: On-Prem Application Delivery

For delivering custom SaaS apps on-premises, C3 gives you:

Compute: Scale-out VM or bare metal shapes
Storage: Block storage for application data, object storage for backups and logs
Networking & IAM: Secure customer or tenant access with OCI VCNs and IAM policies
Automation: Automate provisioning and patching with Terraform or Ansible

Keep control of data location and meet strict hosting requirements without sacrificing automation.

9. HPC Cluster: High-Performance Compute Workloads

Scientific computing, simulations, and modeling all need power and throughput. C3 delivers:

Bare Metal Compute: High-core CPUs or GPU-enabled shapes
Block Storage: High-throughput, low-latency volumes
VCN Networking: Low-latency, high-bandwidth internal networking
Automation: Automate batch jobs and cluster provisioning

Run parallel workloads with full performance and zero public cloud exposure.

10. Cloud-Native Factory: Microservices and Containers

Modern apps are built as services. C3 provides a flexible platform for running containerized workloads:

Compute: VM shapes optimized for Kubernetes or container runtimes
Object Storage: Store unstructured data and backups
VCNs: Service discovery and secure east-west traffic
IAM & Policies: Control who can deploy, scale, and access services
Automation: Script infra using OCI-native modules

Build your own cloud-native stack on-premises, with no compromises.

OCI IaaS – Now Running Inside Your Data Center

C3 isn’t just “cloud-like infrastructure”, it’s a managed extension of OCI inside your own data center. While it doesn’t operate as a full OCI region, it gives you consistent architecture, tooling, and governance:

OCI Tenancy Integration: C3 connects directly to your OCI tenancy and control plane
Logical Domains: Configure availability and fault domains within C3 for redundancy and workload isolation
Compute & Storage: Use the same VM shapes, block storage, and object storage services as in OCI
Networking: Build out networks with VCNs, subnets, route tables, NSGs, and security lists (identical to OCI)
IAM: Apply OCI policies, compartments, and user access controls locally
Automation: Leverage the same Terraform modules, SDKs, and CLI used in OCI public regions

You get core OCI IaaS services, fully managed by Oracle, but physically hosted in your data center, without needing to change your tools, APIs, or architecture principles.

Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Should Be Your Go-To for Price and Performance

Jul 2, 2025 | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

When it comes to choosing a cloud provider, price and performance are king. But how often do we get a cloud vendor that genuinely excels at both? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) stands out in this regard. Thanks to its unique Gen2 architecture, OCI delivers powerful performance while offering some of the most competitive pricing in the industry and making it an obvious first choice for organizations serious about cost efficiency and scalability:

What if OCI’s networking prices are 10x lower than AWS or GCP?
What if you can get the same performance but 5-20x cheaper?
How does 90% lower data egress costs sound to you?
What if the same virtual machine costs 50-60% less in OCI?

With its smart pricing and a unique Gen2 architecture, OCI gives you more bang for your buck than AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Here’s why you should make OCI your first choice and why its tech is a game-changer.

The Gen2 Architecture – A New Foundation for Cloud

Oracle’s Gen2 cloud architecture represents a complete departure from the design philosophies of first-generation clouds. While those earlier clouds prioritized rapid growth and multi-tenant economies of scale, OCI Gen2 is built from the ground up with security, performance, and cost-efficiency as equal pillars.

One of the most significant differences lies in how OCI manages network and compute resources. In most clouds, workloads share a large, multi-tenant network fabric. This shared environment leads to noisy neighbour effects, unpredictable latency, and variable throughput, all of which can hurt application performance and user experience.

Oracle took a radically different approach by providing dedicated, isolated network fabrics for each customer. This means that when you deploy workloads in OCI, your traffic doesn’t compete with anyone else’s on the physical network. The result is a predictable, low-latency, and high-throughput network environment that’s crucial for modern applications that demand real-time responsiveness and consistent performance.

This network isolation is not only important for performance but also a key factor in security. By isolating the network at the physical level, OCI reduces the attack surface dramatically, making it easier to meet strict compliance and regulatory requirements without expensive and complex overlay security solutions.

Another core innovation in OCI Gen2 is the strict separation of the control plane and data plane. Simply put, the control plane handles the cloud’s management tasks like provisioning resources, monitoring, and orchestration, while the data plane runs the actual customer workloads. By physically separating these two functions onto different hardware and networks, OCI ensures that management activities cannot interfere with your applications. This separation results in higher uptime and reliability, as faults or maintenance in the control plane won’t cascade to your workloads.

From a cost perspective, this architecture reduces the complexity and overhead involved in running and maintaining the cloud platform. Oracle can operate the control plane more efficiently, which means lower operational costs. Those savings are passed on to customers through lower pricing.

Bare Metal Performance Without the Premium Price Tag

Oracle’s Gen2 cloud also puts a strong emphasis on bare-metal compute instances. Unlike virtual machines that run on hypervisors shared with other tenants, OCI’s bare-metal instances give you exclusive access to physical servers. This is a huge advantage for performance-intensive workloads such as large databases, real-time analytics, or high-performance computing (HPC).

Because you don’t share CPU, memory, or storage I/O with other tenants, you avoid the noisy neighbour problem. The dedicated hardware means your applications get full access to the server’s resources, delivering consistent and predictable performance.

But here’s the kicker: Oracle offers this level of performance at a price point that is often significantly lower than comparable offerings from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. How is this possible?

The answer circles back to the design efficiencies in Gen2. Oracle built the cloud stack vertically integrated. They design their own hardware, operating system (Oracle Linux), and the full cloud software stack. This vertical integration reduces dependency on third-party components and the layered licensing costs that often inflate the price in other clouds. When Oracle bundles the entire stack, it can optimize it holistically, leading to better resource utilization and lower total cost of ownership.

Autonomous Services – Delivering More Value for Less

Oracle doesn’t stop at infrastructure. They embed autonomy into their cloud services, such as Autonomous Database and Autonomous Linux, which leverage AI and machine learning to automate routine management, tuning, patching, and security.

This automation reduces human intervention, cuts the risk of errors, and enhances system reliability. For businesses, it means lower administrative overhead, fewer outages, and faster time to value. From a financial perspective, automation translates directly into cost savings, enabling customers to reduce their cloud management staff or reallocate them to higher-value projects.

This autonomous layer is another key differentiator that allows Oracle to offer competitive pricing without compromising service quality or performance.

Cost Efficiency Through Innovative Design and Flexible Pricing

OCI’s architectural innovations are only part of the story. Their pricing model itself is designed to be straightforward and customer-friendly. Unlike other hyperscalers, Oracle avoids hidden costs and complex pricing tiers that can quickly inflate cloud bills.

With OCI, you get the same predictable pricing in all regions with transparent billing and multiple flexible options – from pay-as-you-go to reserved instances and bring-your-own-license (BYOL) programs. This flexibility allows customers to optimize spend based on their specific workload patterns and long-term commitments.

Furthermore, OCI’s design achieves higher density and efficiency in its data centers. By packing more compute power into less physical space and using dedicated networks, Oracle lowers its operational expenses.

Performance Meets Affordability

In practical terms, this means Oracle Cloud customers often enjoy superior performance for workloads such as Oracle databases, analytics engines, and enterprise applications. At a fraction of the cost they would pay elsewhere. Benchmark after benchmark shows that OCI delivers lower latency, higher throughput, and more consistent response times, all while maintaining cost competitiveness.

For enterprises and cloud-native startups, this combination is a game-changer. It means you no longer have to make tough trade-offs between price and performance. Instead, you can build and scale your cloud workloads confidently, knowing that you are getting enterprise-grade infrastructure that is both fast and affordable.

Start Small, Save Big – Using OCI for Development Environments to Cut Costs and Mitigate Cloud Concentration Risk

One of the most practical and strategic ways organizations can begin their journey with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is by using OCI to run their development and testing environments. This approach not only unlocks immediate cost savings but also helps reduce the risks associated with relying too heavily on a single cloud vendor. A concept often referred to as cloud concentration risk.

Development environments are typically resource-intensive but don’t always require the same level of performance or uptime guarantees as production systems. This makes them an ideal workload for taking advantage of OCI’s cost-effective pricing and flexible infrastructure. By shifting dev/test workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, organizations can immediately reduce their cloud spend without sacrificing the agility developers need to experiment, build, and innovate.

OCI offers a rich set of developer tools and a highly performant infrastructure that supports container orchestration, serverless functions, and a variety of database services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, which can accelerate app development and reduce administrative overhead. This enables teams to spin up complex environments quickly and cost-efficiently, speeding up delivery cycles and boosting productivity.

Beyond cost savings, using OCI for development also strategically diversifies an organization’s cloud footprint. Most enterprises today find themselves deeply invested in one or two major hyperscalers. While these providers offer great services, putting all your eggs in one basket exposes your business to risks like service outages, pricing changes, or contractual lock-in.

Starting with development workloads on OCI is often a low-friction, high-impact step. It allows your teams to familiarize themselves with Oracle’s cloud environment, test integrations, and validate performance without disrupting critical production systems. Once confident, organizations can gradually extend OCI usage into staging and production, leveraging Oracle’s Gen2 architecture benefits for mission-critical workloads as well.

One of the most powerful ways to streamline this multi-cloud approach, especially when starting with development workloads on OCI, is by using Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC). Terraform allows teams to define and provision their infrastructure in a consistent, declarative way across different cloud providers. Whether you are deploying a Kubernetes cluster in OCI, spinning up VMs in AWS, or provisioning storage buckets in Azure, the workflow remains the same. This consistency makes it incredibly easy to replicate environments across clouds, reduce configuration drift, and avoid vendor lock-in.

Oracle DB Multi-Cloud

With Oracle providing a robust and well-maintained Terraform provider, you can automate the deployment of OCI resources with the same toolchain you already use elsewhere. It’s a practical and future-proof strategy: start small with dev workloads in OCI, manage them seamlessly with Terraform, and keep your cloud architecture agile and resilient from day one.

How Oracle Support Rewards Reduces Your Cloud Bill

One of the most overlooked but incredibly powerful incentives in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the Oracle Support Rewards (OSR) program. For organizations already using Oracle software on-premises, this program can significantly reduce the cost of cloud adoption by turning existing support spend into cloud credits. If you are an Oracle customer today: It is a serious financial lever!

Here is how it works. Many enterprises pay annual support fees for their existing Oracle software licenses, whether for databases, middleware, or applications. With Oracle Support Rewards, every dollar you spend on OCI infrastructure earns you credits that can be applied to your on-premises support bill. These rewards are accrued automatically based on your OCI usage, and the impact can be substantial: in some cases, enterprises can reduce their Oracle support bill by 25% to 33%.

With Oracle Support Rewards, the more you use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the more you save. Customers can accrue $0.25 to $0.33 in rewards for every $1 spent on OCI. Those rewards can be used to pay down your tech software license support bill, even down to zero.

This program effectively reduces the total cost of cloud migration, especially for customers who want to modernize their Oracle workloads in OCI. It also makes hybrid strategies more financially attractive. You can continue running key systems on-premises, but start building new services in the cloud, and get rewarded just for doing so. Example:

Let’s say you start with a $1M annual Oracle technology support bill and spend $2M on OCI for two new workloads. In this scenario, you’ll earn $500K in Oracle Support Rewards, reducing your annual bill by half.

The real advantage lies in how Oracle tightly integrates the value chain. Unlike other hyperscalers, which require you to license Oracle software separately and often at a premium, Oracle owns the full stack (hardware, cloud, database, and support). That vertical integration allows Oracle to offer support rewards in a way that no other provider can replicate.

In practical terms, OSR makes it possible to run OCI workloads – sometimes entire dev/test or production environments – with effective discounts that would be impossible in a competing cloud. If your organization is already paying for Oracle support, not taking advantage of this program means leaving money on the table.

The more you move to OCI, the more you save. It is a self-reinforcing cycle. The deeper your cloud adoption, the more support rewards you accumulate, which in turn lowers your existing on-prem costs, freeing up budget to accelerate further cloud projects.

The Bottom Line

If you want a cloud that’s fast, affordable, and built for the future, OCI is your best bet. Its Gen2 architecture delivers unmatched performance and savings, making it ideal for startups, enterprises, or anyone tired of overpaying for cloud. Starting with OCI for your dev environments? You will save big, stay flexible, and avoid getting trapped by a single vendor.

Curious about your savings? Check out Oracle’s cost estimator at oracle.com and see why OCI is stealing the cloud spotlight. Or study this IDC paper about The Business Value of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).