Privatized public cloud

The new "Oracle Cloud at Customer" offering presented at the end of March 2016 brings the Oracle Cloud behind the firewall into the data center. It privatizes Oracle's public cloud offerings, so to speak.

Oracle is thus meeting the requirements of companies that often face barriers and hurdles when using cloud offerings. Issues such as data sovereignty, control and performance play a particularly important role for public authorities, financial service providers and the healthcare sector.

Organizations need to store and process data in accordance with laws and regulations. This is why there is often a desire to take advantage of cloud services, but still want to keep sensitive data in their own data center. This means that companies themselves also determine the security standards they consider necessary in the age of the cloud.

The desire for control is particularly strong for business-critical systems. They can use their own firewalls, load balancers, hardware and VPNs etc. in their own data center. This enables them to achieve extremely demanding service level agreements. This also applies to performance, for example.

Access to backend systems, mainframes, databases and ERP applications is possible with virtually no delay, especially if resources can be specifically assigned to certain tasks.

Free choice: public and private cloud

Against this backdrop, it seems inevitable that the market researchers at IDC Futurescape have come to the following conclusion: "More than 80 percent of all corporate IT organizations will turn to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017.

This will expand and accelerate the change in IT organizations." The Oracle Cloud Machine, the service offering that Oracle provides to its customers as part of the Oracle Cloud at Customer, will contribute to this.

It gives customers full control over where they want to store and process their data: in their own Oracle Cloud Machine behind the firewall or in the public Oracle Public Cloud. To achieve this, Oracle relies on the same standards, the same products, the same interfaces and standardized administration.

PaaS and IaaS offerings

Oracle's Cloud Machine for its own data center includes almost all PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offerings, as they are also available in the Oracle Public Cloud: Computing power, network resources and storage for IaaS; database, Java, tools and frameworks for software developers, identity management, integration services for hybrid architectures, services for mobile applications and process support for PaaS. The IaaS resources are accessed via an open interface.

Subscription does not tie up capital

The Oracle Cloud Machine, including hardware and all services available on it, is offered to customers as a complete service by subscription. As this is a service, the entire operation, including behind the firewall, is managed by Oracle; this includes installation and configuration, operation and support as well as administration.

With this offer, Oracle has further extended the absolute freedom of choice between private and public cloud. For example, customers can carry out test and development projects in the public cloud and then transfer them to the Oracle Cloud Machine for productive use without any changes.

This allows them to concentrate on the development of modern, cloud-based applications and their digital processes, while Oracle takes care of the operation of their cloud. Oracle also supports this model in terms of costs: the subscription costs for the corresponding services for the Oracle Public Cloud and the Oracle Cloud Machine are the same.

In addition, the Oracle Cloud Machine represents a considerable cost advantage compared to investing in hardware and software and operating your own private cloud, and does not tie up any capital thanks to the usage-based billing model.