MILAN, Dec. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle today announced the opening of its first cloud region in Milan, Italy, to support the increasing cloud computing demands of private and public sector organizations. The Oracle Cloud Milan Region will provide customers and partners access to Oracle Cloud services to drive business growth. Oracle's next-generation cloud is now available in 36 regions worldwide with plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022, continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider.  

The Milan region is strategically located in the heart of Italy's business and industrial hub, supporting some of Italy's largest public sector organizations and its most important industries including banking, fashion, food and tourism—as well as one of Europe's largest start-up communities. Over half of Italy's industrial and business activity is based in the Lombardy region, which produces almost a quarter of Italy's GDP.

The Milan region strengthens Oracle's extensive network in the European Union, with Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Marseille, and Stockholm already available, and a second region in France and one in Spain planned to open. Oracle Cloud Regions are already available in the UK and Switzerland.

"It is important that we offer organizations access to cloud infrastructure that is located in Italy to manage their most critical data and applications. We currently see significant growth in our cloud business that reflects our customers' desire to rapidly digitize their operations so they can better serve their customers," said Alessandro Ippolito, vice president and country general manager, Oracle Italy. "The Milan region also supports the Italian government's 'Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza' (National Plan of Recovery and Resilience) initiative, which aims to promote the economic recovery of the country through digital modernization. Having a cloud region on Italian soil will help facilitate the adoption of Oracle Cloud services by government entities and Italy's highly regulated industries."

Built on OCI's next-generation architecture, the Milan region provides a resilient, high-performance foundation for cloud services, with a physical and virtual network design that helps optimize performance and security. Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and Oracle Cloud VMware are now available from Milan for customers that want to leverage a cloud region in Italy. This may help organizations in highly regulated industries like banking and public sectors with their efforts to meet important regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, Oracle offers a wide range of application modernization and cloud strategies to help Italian organizations operate with global competitiveness.

Customer Commentary on the Opening of the Milan Region

Marcella Schiavi, IT Manager, Trenord, a subsidiary of Trenitalia, dedicated to public rail transport in the most mobile region of Italy, Lombardy, said: "In 2017 we started to renew and consolidate our infrastructure working toward cloud solutions. We selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for our ticketing platform, to ensure high performance in a safe, innovative and sustainable way. Today, we confirm and renew our choice together with Azienda Trasporti Milanesi (ATM), who manages public transport and integrated mobility in Milan and across Lombardy, to jointly deliver the new electronic ticketing systems created by the SBE Consortium. The Oracle Cloud Milan Region offers us further opportunities to scale to the cloud with low latency allowing us to focus on customer experience and data security."

Roberto Andreoli, Chief Information Officer, ATM, added: "The new electronic ticketing system project, coordinated by the SBE consortium, will use the Milan region. This is with the goal of ensuring the interoperability of electronic ticketing systems for the transport network of the metropolitan city of Milan and the region of Lombardy."

Alessio Pomasan, Chief Information Officer, Banca Mediolanum, a leading bank, insurance and asset management provider, said: "Banca Mediolanum has long been using Oracle technology services to manage our most mission-critical data. The new cloud region in Italy is interesting because it offers new opportunities for a company like ours which operates in a highly regulated market. With reduced service and application latencies facilitated by the proximity of the Milan region, we will be able to explore new possibilities and ways of operating and serving our customers."

Mario Martinelli, Chief Information Officer, SISAL, a major gaming company with a network of over 50,000 retail outlets, said: "As a leading international gaming operator, SISAL is an inherently a data-driven business, and Oracle has always been central to this approach. With Oracle Cloud we have been able to vastly accelerate innovation—including bringing innovative Artificial Intelligence solutions to our services—and create more value through data across our business. The high performance and low latency offered by the new Milan region will give us the flexibility to move more critical workloads to the cloud and enable us to consider new business opportunities and service offerings."

Giuseppe Cardillo, IT Director, Gruppo Bancario Cooperativo Iccrea, said: "After initially consolidating our data management with Oracle databases on Exadata Engineered Systems, the intermediate step to the cloud was Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. By this I mean cloud services with machines physically located in our data centres. We are very pleased with the opening of an Oracle Cloud Region in Italy. This will facilitate our cloud adoption path with regulatory and also technical benefits, including lower latency which will make everything more efficient."

Anna Sappa, Chief Technology Officer, INAIL (National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work), an Italian statutory corporation overseen by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies, said: "Thanks to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, we had already chosen to 'build our own cloud' in our data centres in Rome. By using cloud technology to complete the consolidation of our Institute's data, we began to use new deployment, provisioning and monitoring tools. Now we are ready to complete our journey to the cloud, in accordance with the government guidelines on data management. That is why the opening of an Oracle Cloud Milan Region is of great interest for INAIL – it has the levels of security and performance that we have come to appreciate, combined with an improvement in latencies and disaster protection."

Filippo Cecchi, IT Infrastructure and Services Lead, Unicoop Firenze, one of the oldest and biggest large-scale distribution organisations in Italy with retail outlets throughout Tuscany, said: "We have always used Oracle systems and technology for data management and analytics. This provides more timely and personalised services to customers and helps us manage distribution in a sustainable and economically viable way. We are very familiar with Oracle technology on-premises, and we have started working in a hybrid mode with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivering excellent results. That is why the opening of an Oracle Cloud Region in Italy will be essential to continue our migration of workloads to the cloud, thanks to low latency and high performance."

Flavio Mauri, Chief Information Officer, Cerved Group, the main Italian data provider for banking and insurance, said: "Oracle's choice to open a cloud region in Italy fully meets the expectations of Cerved Group. As a matter of fact, it was our intention to move our data management architecture to the cloud, so we will be among the first Oracle customers to operate in this region in Italy."

Andrea Cesarini, Oracle Business Group Lead Europe, Accenture, said: "The opening of the Milan region in Italy will enable us to better help our clients reimagine their futures with cloud, using it as a launchpad to drive continuous innovation and unlock the value of data. By leveraging Oracle Cloud, organizations across industries can bring the power and efficiency of automation to business functions across their enterprise in a secure environment. Finally, the fact that Oracle's cloud platforms are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources will help our clients advance their sustainability efforts."

Sustainability as a Priority

Oracle is committed to sustainability and has pledged to power all Oracle Cloud regions worldwide with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, South America, and eight cloud regions in Europe are already powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimize their impact on the environment. As part of its renewable energy clean Cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6 percent of its retired hardware in FY21 while strictly adhering to Oracle's data privacy and security practices.

Cloud Regions Deliver Multicloud

Oracle's strategy is to meet customers where they are, and providing options that can enable customers to have data and services hosted largely where they need it. Customers can deploy Oracle Cloud within their own data centres with Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, deploy cloud services locally with public cloud-based management, or deploy cloud services remotely on the edge with Roving Edge Infrastructure.

OCI's extensive network of more than 70 regional and global FastConnect partners provides customers with dedicated connectivity to Oracle cloud regions and OCI services, giving them one of the best options anywhere in the world. FastConnect can be a relatively  easy, flexible and cost-effective way to create a dedicated, private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency and more consistent performance than public Internet connections.

In addition, OCI and Microsoft Azure have established a strategic partnership that allows joint customers to run workloads in both clouds. The partnership offers a low-latency cross-cloud interconnection between OCI and Azure in 8 select regions, a federated identity for joint customers deploying applications in both clouds, and a collaborative support model.

Customers can run full-stack applications in a multicloud configuration, while maintaining high-performance connectivity that doesn't require another architecture. They can also potentially migrate existing applications or develop native cloud applications that use a combination of OCI and Azure services.

Currently available Oracle Cloud regions:

• Asia Pacific: Tokyo (Japan), Osaka (Japan), Seoul (South Korea), Chuncheon (South Korea), Mumbai (India), Hyderabad (India), Sydney (Australia), Melbourne (Australia), Singapore (Singapore)
• Americas: San Jose (United States), Phoenix (United States), Ashburn (United States), Toronto (Canada), Montreal (Canada), São Paolo (Brazil), Vinhedo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile)
• Europe: Frankfurt (Germany), London (United Kingdom), Newport, Wales (United Kingdom), Zürich (Switzerland), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Marseille (France), Milan (Italy), Stockholm (Sweden)
• Middle East: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi (U.A.E), Dubai (U.A.E), Jerusalem (Israel)
• Government: Two general U.S. Government regions, and U.S. National Security regions, three U.S. Department of Defense specific Government regions, two in the United Kingdom (London and Newport, Wales)

Additional resources

• More information on Oracle Cloud Regions  
• More information on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

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