OCI’s superior price performance strengthens government missions

August 11, 2023 | 7 minute read
Kelly Crooks
Technical Writer
Text Size 100%:

Rising technology costs impact government entities around the world. To balance increased costs with supporting mission needs, government agencies need to select a cloud service provider (CSP) that can support mission-critical workloads in unclassified and classified environments at an optimal price. 

What’s the best solution for local, state, defense, and intelligence agencies that need to run mission-critical workloads amidst rising technology costs? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) supports government legacy and cloud native applications at an industry-leading price performance.

When compared to other CSP cloud offerings, OCI’s solutions for governments offer the best value proposition. This blog post explores how government customers can utilize OCI to run their mission-critical workloads at a superior price performance.

The comprehensive, cost-effective solution for government regions

OCI offers a wide range of cloud deployment options to solve the toughest technology challenges.

A graphic depicting examples of OCI
Figure 1: OCI’s deployment models

The following examples show OCI’s various deployment models:

  • Public cloud: With regions located in 23 countries globally, Oracle’s public cloud provides a secure, high-performing environment accessible to any customer.

  • EU Sovereign Cloud: Accessible to commercial and public sector organizations located in the European Union (EU), this cloud offering aligns with EU data privacy and sovereignty requirements.

  • Government Cloud

  • Dedicated Region: OCI Dedicated Region is a self-contained cloud region located in a customer’s data center, allowing customers to retain full control of their data.

  • Oracle Cloud Isolated Region: Oracle Cloud Isolated Region is a highly secure, disconnected cloud solution designed for global defense and intelligence entities that need to run classified, sensitive workloads in an air-gapped, on-premises environment without internet connection.

  • Oracle Alloy: A customizable platform that allows partners to become cloud providers to their customers.

OCI offers the same predictable and competitive services pricing in all of our cloud regions

Unlike other CSPs that charge more for government cloud regions, OCI offers government entities the same cloud consumption pricing that we offer in our public regions, with no price increase for higher security classification environments. For example, whether you’re running a workload in OCI’s public London region or in Oracle’s UK Government and Defense Cloud, the price of services is the same. Committed use discounts, software license portability, and rewards for OCI consumption are also available.

Because OCI’s services are available at a lower price than competitors, government agencies can consume more cloud services and modernize their technology cost effectively. When compared to other CSP government cloud offerings, OCI consistently offers lower government cloud pricing across the stack. OCI’s data egress provides significant savings when compared to competitors, as shown in the following figure.

A table comparing OCI pricing in government regions to other CSPs.
Figure 2: OCI pricing in government regions compared to other CSPs

One of the best benefits of the cloud is that government entities only pay for services consumed. With Oracle’s Cost Management and Governance tools like budgets, cost analysis, and usage reports, government customers can keep track of their cloud usage and apply OCI’s transparent pricing model to anticipate spending, save money, and budget accordingly.

Security for less

Security in the cloud is crucial for government customers that run highly sensitive workloads. With OCI’s built-in security architecture, OCI offers a full set of security features and services, and most are free. Our free services include Identity and Access Management (IAM), Oracle Cloud Guard, bastions, and DDoS protection that provide layered security for our customers. In contrast, other CSPs offer a limited set of free security services.

A graphic showing some of OCI security services.
Figure 3: A sampling of free OCI security services

OCI’s zero-trust security model, combined with our free security services, allows government customers to easily adopt a security-first approach.

High-performance technology and cost savings

OCI is built to securely run workloads faster and more efficiently, including those in government regions, with superior services at a low price. The high performance and cost savings of running workloads in OCI has made it a top choice for government customers.

Consider services like high-performance computing (HPC), an OCI Compute service that provides powerful data processing and complex problem solving at high rates of speed. With OCI HPC, customers can deploy workloads efficiently at a lower price than Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the following image, all Amazon and OCI compute and network pricing are accurate as of May 1, 2020. This benchmark package was run from standard performance evaluation. Stream Triad benchmarks were run at 4 GB. The benchmark numbers for AWS for C5n were reported by AWS.

A chart comparing OCI HPC with AWS.
Figure 4: OCI HPC in comparison with AWS

With HPC, OCI Compute encompasses a wide range of services, including virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal instances that are all offered at the same, consistent global pricing as OCI public cloud regions.

Another service that showcases OCI’s valuable price performance is Oracle Exadata, a database platform for running Oracle databases faster and more efficiently. Released June 22, 2023, Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X10M can run analytics at 2,880 GB/s with a sub-17 microsecond latency. You can deploy Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X10M on OCI or on-premises in a customer’s data center. Global industry analysts find that Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X10M’s capabilities allow customers to dramatically reduce the cost of meeting their growing database processing needs.

OCI’s flexible Compute shapes also allow governments to scale resources and accommodate their sensitive workloads at an industry-leading price performance without paying for unused capacity. Unlike some other providers, OCI Compute allows you to scale the size by a single CPU core and 1 GB per core on AMD, Arm-based, and Intel processors, so you avoid overpaying for unneeded capacity.

While this information is just a sampling of OCI’s services that you can deploy across all our deployment models, government customers can select these services and more to efficiently and cost effectively bring the world’s most important workloads to OCI.

OCI’s transparent pricing and superior service performance offer governments the best value proposition

OCI offers government, defense, and intelligence agencies a hyperscale cloud that can host highly sensitive and classified workloads at an industry-leading price performance. With Oracle-operated infrastructure, government customers can focus on their mission, instead of maintaining cumbersome technology. In many cases, the cost differential is so significant that it can make the difference between whether a particular system is viable in the cloud or not. OCI’s pricing lets customers bring more missions to the cloud.

Learn more about our significant pricing benefits, including Oracle Support Rewards and Universal Credits, by visiting OCI Pricing and Oracle Cloud Economics.

To find out if an Oracle Cloud Isolated Region or another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deployment model is right for you, or if you want to try out Oracle Cloud Free Tier on a 30-day trial basis, contact your sales representative for more details.

For more information, see the following resources:

Kelly Crooks

Technical Writer


Previous Post

Moving Java Forward at Oracle CloudWorld 2023

Sharat Chander | 6 min read

Next Post


Monitoring OCI File Storage metrics through OCI Notifications

Joshua Jebakani | 5 min read