REDWOOD SHORES, Jul 25 — Oracle Cloud has emerged as a significant player in the global cloud computing market, with capabilities that the company positions as especially suited for the secure, high-performance workloads required by government and defence clients. For communities across Asia, the expansion of such infrastructure raises questions about digital sovereignty, public sector modernisation, and the reliability of cloud services for critical national functions.
The service, operated by Oracle Corporation, provides a broad range of on-demand resources—servers, storage, networking, applications, and services—delivered through a global network of data centres managed by Oracle itself. It offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Data as a Service (DaaS).
This architecture is built to support open standards including SQL, HTML5, and REST, as well as open-source applications such as Kubernetes, Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, MySQL, and Terraform. Multiple programming languages are also supported.
A History of Evolution
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as it is now known, made its debut on October 20, 2016, under the name Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services. At the time, the offering was distinguished by bare metal instances running on Intel processors. In 2018, the company rebranded the platform as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and unveiled it under the marketing moniker ‘Generation 2 Cloud’.
That same year, bare metal instances based on AMD processors were added to the lineup. By 2021, Oracle introduced Ampere Cloud-native processors, followed by the first virtual-machine-based compute instances built on Arm processors—also in 2021.
Infrastructure and Services
Today, the compute offerings include Virtual Machine Instances, on-demand bare metal servers, and bare metal GPU servers that operate without a hypervisor. Storage is handled through block volumes, file storage, object storage, and archive storage. The networking layer gives customers fully configurable IP addresses, subnets, routing, and firewalls for private networks.
The data management platform supports Oracle, MySQL, and NoSQL databases as managed services. Among the highlighted offerings is the Oracle Autonomous Database, which can be optimised for data warehouse, transaction processing, or JSON workloads.
The platform also includes the Exadata shape and Real Application Clusters (RAC). Load balancing routes traffic across fault domains and availability domains to ensure high availability. Edge services include Domain Name System (DNS) capabilities, which came with the acquisition of Dyn.
Additionally, FastConnect offers private connectivity through partners.
Governance and Security
For government clients, governance features are a critical concern. Oracle Cloud provides auditing, identity and access management, data integrity checks, and traceability. These tools allow administrators to monitor who accessed what data and when, and to enforce policies across the cloud environment.
The application development platform supports container-native, cloud-native, and low-code development, with a DevOps pipeline for continuous integration and continuous delivery, along with Java diagnostics.
For Government and Defence Clients
In the Asia-Pacific region, where governments are increasingly looking to move sensitive data to the cloud while complying with local data sovereignty laws, Oracle Cloud’s emphasis on security and performance may prove attractive. The availability of bare metal instances, virtual machines, and GPU servers—all without a hypervisor in the bare metal case—offers a level of isolation and control that some public-sector agencies require. The platform’s support for both proprietary Oracle databases and open-source technologies also gives procurement officers flexibility when designing IT architectures.
As of this writing, it remains to be seen which governments in the region will formally adopt Oracle Cloud for mission-critical operations, but the foundational infrastructure is clearly in place.
