Zoom has chosen public cloud giant Oracle to help manage the enormous surge in users that its video conferencing platform has sustained a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be adopted to support Zoom's rapid growth and evolving business needs as it continues to develop its services. To illustrate the platform's exorbitant growth, the firm added 100 million new users within a three-week period and also claims to boast 300 million daily meeting participants.
Zoom realised it needed additional cloud capacity immediately, so the service provider's second-generation infrastructure was chosen to help the firm scale its capabilities so it could continue to deliver an undisrupted service to users and customers.
The deal will see Oracle join existing providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in providing support to Zoom, although AWS will retain the bulk of the workload.
"We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users," said Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan.
"We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance, and unmatched level of support."
Oracle claims it’s well placed to support Zoom’s rapid expansion thanks to its network architecture, capacity and the locations of its data centres. For reference, Zoom is currently transferring more than 7,000TB through Oracle's systems each day, with this figure is only expected to grow.
Despite Zoom's rapid growth and overnight success, the platform has been tarnished with a heft backlash around a collection of security and privacy shortcomings, varying in severity. The phenomenon of 'Zoom-bombing', for example, was deemed severe enough for the FBI to officially warn consumers and businesses against the potential for their meetings to be infiltrated by unauthorised third-parties.
Moreover, claims in Zoom promotional material that the platform guaranteed encryption was debunked following an investigation by journalists and analysts. The company last week released a major update adding 256-bit encryption to address these concerns, as part of a 90-day plan to rectify the overarching security concerns.
For Oracle, meanwhile, the deal represents a chance to eat into the massive market share enjoyed by its major cloud rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
