Oracle IL5 PATO Offers New Possibilities for Defense Agencies

When Oracle recently announced that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) DoD Regions for IaaS/PaaS achieved Impact Level (IL) 5 Provisional Authorization (PATO), we knew it was an important milestone – not only for Oracle but also for our customers. When we designed OCI for IaaS & PaaS, a major use case for agencies had to be the Oracle database and the critical business applications that run on top of our database. So we knew we had to deliver exceptional results for these demanding workloads – and the results showed we hit the mark, with Oracle’s government cloud.

The effort also builds on top of our track record of delivering previous DoD Cloud certifications. Oracle has been working with DoD customers on Oracle DoD Cloud (IL5) for IaaS/PaaS for fit-for-purpose enterprise requirements for Oracle database, applications, and heterogeneous workloads. This announcement only further builds on Oracle's success of offering the first SaaS cloud at IL4 PATO – the U.S. Air Force MyPers solution, its personnel portal for 1.7 million active duty and retired airmen. The Air Force has been in Oracle SaaS Service Cloud since 2016.

For performance-intensive database workloads, in addition to offering the Oracle Exadata engineered system as a cloud service, Oracle has a next-generation cloud flat network topology that connects our cloud components, including between servers and the block storage sub-systems. The network and our compute resources have no resource over-subscription, so performance isn’t compromised when the network or a server gets busy. Storage traffic uses the full 25-Gbps pipe to the server. The Oracle Block Volume Service is designed for maximum performance with all-SSD capacity and rates the highest IOPS per GB, and IOPS per instance metrics of any block storage service in the cloud.

And OCI is just different. It distinguishes itself among cloud providers for having predictable performance and a security-first design. Security must be ubiquitous, agile and scalable. With Oracle Cloud infrastructure, customer code, data and resources live on a separate computer while cloud control code lives on a different physical compute, with a different architecture.  With this approach, Oracle does not access customer data, and there is no user access to the cloud control code.

In addition, Oracle has received the Cloud Authority to Connect, based on the DoD Cloud Connection Process Guide (CCPG).  That guide specifies that a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) can register with DISA for Boundary Cloud Access Point (BCAP) connectivity after the CSP has attained an IL4/5 accreditation. Learn more about our solutions for public sector.