Oracle to open G-Cloud certified UK datacentre

Oracle is throwing further weight behind the UK Government's G-Cloud initiative with the opening of a new Thames Valley-based datacentre.

The facility, the second the company has opened in the UK, will be used to host cloud services that can be procured by Government departments via the G-Cloud framework and CloudStore catalogue.

As such, the datacentre will be compliant with the Business Impact Level 3 (IL3) standard that certifies cloud services as safe to use by Government departments.

As well as Oracle's cloud offerings, ISVs will also be able to host their G-Cloud-certified cloud applications at the facility.

The software giant announced the move at its UK Cloud World event in London earlier today.

Speaking at the event, Oracle president Mark Hurd said the datacentre's opening is all part of the firm's push to "globalise" its cloud offerings.

"As this cloud evolves and develops, you've got security concerns that come up...and issues about the physical location of data and [this means] we have to be local in our deployment of our [cloud] capabilities," explained Hurd.

"We have datacentres in many countries now, and you should expect that to continue as our business continues to scale up.

"[We're making] over a billion dollars [in] cloud subscription revenues...we're the second biggest player in the cloud and [we're] globalising our capabilities," he added.

Oracle stopped short of revealing the exact location of the facility, citing data security concerns, except to say it will be Thames Valley-based.

Dermot O'Kelly, Oracle's UK and Ireland country manager, said the site is expected to open in July, and has been built with the Government's G-Cloud recommendations in mind.

"We already had one [datacentre], which is a general purpose [facility]," he said.

"This will be a ring-fenced datacentre to specifically serve the Government, one of Oracle's largest customers in the UK."

He also went on to suggest the decision to open up the new datacentre to ISVs could support the Government's push to procure more IT services from SMBs.

"We would like to support SMBs and we'd also like to...provide more services to Government and I think cloud is a great solution for Government and we want to accelerate them getting there and get services provisioned from Oracle," O'Kelly added.