Oracle’s new EU Sovereign Cloud regions to help enterprises meet data regulations

Oracle’s Sovereign Cloud offers physical separation

In contrast to other public cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud that offer controls to meet data regulations within existing cloud regions or cloud services, Oracle’s EU Sovereign Cloud is physically separate from its existing ten cloud regions in the EU.

The new Sovereign Cloud, according to the company, doesn’t share any infrastructure with Oracle’s other regions in the EU and has no backbone network connection to any Oracle cloud region globally.

Additionally, access to the Sovereign Cloud is managed separately from Oracle’s other commercial regions in order to enhance data security, Oracle said.  

The company claims to have added a new control layer, dubbed realm isolation, for the Sovereign Cloud, which imposes more restrictions based on security clearance and residency of personnel.

“Access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is based upon the concept of least privilege, which means restricting role entitlements to the minimum required to perform functions and implementing strict identity authorization policies,” Oracle’s senior manager Sarah Fujita wrote in a blog post.

“Access of operations staff to the infrastructure and services supporting OCI requires multifactor authentication, a VPN connection, and an SSH (Secure Shell) connection with a user account and password or private key,” Fujita added.