Offering a sovereign cloud designed for the European Union

June 20, 2023 | 4 minute read
Scott Twaddle
Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Product and Industries
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We’re pleased to announce the launch of Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, a hyperscale cloud that addresses data residency and sovereignty requirements in the European Union and delivers the services, value and service level agreements (SLAs) offered in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) commercial public cloud regions. Customers want the benefits and efficiency of a global cloud platform but are increasingly concerned with control over their data and the ability to meet evolving regulatory requirements in global hyperscale clouds. Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud is designed to help meet these requirements for both private companies in regulated industries and public sector organizations that use cloud computing to host their applications and sensitive data in the EU.

Sovereignty without added cost or compromise

Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud has been built on our experience hosting mission-critical workloads for enterprise and government customers with exacting security, compliance, and performance requirements. To accomplish this goal, OCI developed an innovative distributed cloud architecture and operating model that enables us to deploy cloud regions faster and in more locations, each operating independently and offering all our cloud services. This model has allowed us to offer separate government regions for the US and UK governments and deploy and operate complete dedicated cloud regions inside the data centers of our customers.

Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud is our next independently managed cloud, serving both commercial and government customers that need to align with EU data residency and sovereignty requirements. It’s located and operated entirely within the EU, with two cloud regions in Madrid, Spain and Frankfurt, Germany. These cloud regions are physically and logically separate from our other commercial and government cloud regions, including the existing commercial regions in Madrid, Frankfurt, and our five other EU locations. The sovereign cloud regions are owned and operated by new Oracle legal entities incorporated in the EU, with operations and support personnel restricted to EU residents. They use a policy framework for data and operational sovereignty that includes how OCI stores and manages data and handles access requests from entities outside the EU.

Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud offers over 100 of the same cloud services that are available in all our cloud regions at the same simple, consistent rates, and favorable economics compared to other clouds. Innovative features, such as flexible compute, help eliminate needless overpayment. Committed use discounts, software license portability, and rewards for OCI consumption are also available. Oracle Fusion Applications, currently offered in a European Union Restricted Access (EURA) offering, is soon available in Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud. Two new services, OCI Dedicated Key Management and External Key Management, give customers more tools to control their data in the EU Sovereign Cloud.

Resiliency and regulatory compliance for the EU

Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud enables customers to build resilient applications that keep data within EU borders. Customers can use the two cloud regions in Madrid and Frankfurt, separated by about 1500 km, for redundancy and regional disaster recovery. Each Oracle Cloud Region has at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form virtual data centers for local high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures.

EU Sovereign Cloud can help digital transformation efforts across critical regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and government. OCI enables customers to demonstrate alignment with a range of global, regional, and industry regulatory programs. Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud builds on these programs and aligns with guidance that limit monitoring regulations and data transfers, such as Court of Justice for EU Schrems II Ruling and European Data Protection Board. We expect to extend these sovereign governance and compliance programs as EU requirements evolve.

OCI’s growing distributed cloud addresses customer needs

Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud expands the choices offered by OCI’s distributed cloud, delivering cloud services to needed locations with flexible performance, security, compliance, and operational models. OCI’s distributed cloud includes 44 commercial and government regions in 23 countries, services that enable multicloud architectures, Exadata Cloud@Customer and other hybrid cloud offerings delivered to customer data centers in over 60 countries, and dedicated cloud regions operated for both government and commercial customers.

We believe that a distributed cloud with sovereign cloud deployment options is the best way to address the varying needs of our worldwide customers, and we’re continuing to develop our sovereign and distributed capabilities.

Getting started with EU Sovereign Cloud

For more information on Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud and other distributed cloud options, contact your Oracle representative. To learn more, see the following resources:

Scott Twaddle

Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Product and Industries


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