Oracle today announced the opening of an Oracle Cloud Region in Chicago, Illinois. Continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider, Oracle’s 41st global region and fourth in the U.S. offers customers and partners a new option to locate their infrastructure, applications, and data for optimal performance and latency. The Oracle Cloud Chicago Region gives public and private sector customers and partners based in the U.S. Midwest access to a wide range of cloud services to modernize their applications, innovate with data and analytics, and migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“As the home to more than 20 percent of the Fortune 500, 60 percent of all U.S. manufacturing, and the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange, the U.S. Midwest is a global innovation hub across key industries,” said Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, OCI. “These industries are increasingly seeking secure cloud services to support their need for high-speed data transfer at ultra-low latency. We are excited to open the new Chicago region to help our Midwest customers and partners easily and securely move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud.”

The new Chicago region will offer over 100 OCI services and applications, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave, OCI Data Science, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Analytics. These applications and services will help startups, mid-size, and enterprise teams harness data to uncover new business value and optimize applications without requiring costly re-architecture.

Security to Meet Customers’ Compliance Requirements

The Oracle Cloud Chicago Region has been designed to enable high availability, data residency, and disaster protection. OCI offers layers of security to help ensure resources are provisioned securely for every customer, a zero trust architecture for maximum isolation of customer tenancies, and many integrated customer security services that are offered at no extra charge.

In addition, the Oracle Cloud Chicago Region is designed to help meet the security and compliance needs of customers in both the commercial and public sectors. OCI’s architecture is designed to allow cloud regions to be deployed within separate secure and isolated realms for different uses. The Chicago area is the location of an existing Oracle Cloud Region with DISA Impact Level 5 authorization for use by U.S. government organizations to store and process Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and National Security Systems (NSS) information. Oracle currently operates several independent realms serving the U.S. and U.K. governments, and Oracle has announced that it plans to offer a sovereign cloud realm for the European Union in 2023.

High Availability and Low Latency Provides Customers with a Resilient Cloud Foundation

OCI’s next-generation architecture provides a higher performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design helps maximize performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud Region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centers for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures. In addition, the Oracle Cloud Chicago Region offers three availability domains connected with a high-performance network, helping to enable customers to create highly resilient distributed application architectures.

The new Oracle Cloud Chicago Region provides low-latency networking and high-speed data transfer to allow customers and partners to derive better value from their data. The new region also helps ensure business continuity by creating disaster recovery capabilities using Oracle’s existing U.S. cloud regions in Ashburn, Phoenix, and San Jose. In addition, OCI’s distributed cloud solutions, including Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, can assist with applications where data proximity and low latency in specific locations are of critical importance.

A Focus on Driving Sustainable Operations Across the Globe

Underscoring its ongoing focus on sustainability, Oracle has committed to powering all worldwide Oracle Cloud Regions with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025, including the new Oracle Cloud Chicago Region. Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, South America, and all 10 regions in Europe, are already powered by 100 percent renewable energy, which enables customers to run their computing services more sustainably and with a lower carbon footprint. To further advance its commitment to sustainable operations, Oracle recycled 99.9 percent of its retired hardware in FY’22.

OCI’s Extensive Global Ecosystem Helps Ease and Accelerate Cloud Adoption

OCI’s extensive network of more than 75 global and regional OCI FastConnect partners offers organizations dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud Regions and OCI services. FastConnect provides an easy, flexible, and cost-effective way to create a dedicated, private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance versus public, Internet-based connections. CoreSite and Digital Realty are the host partners for the new Oracle Cloud Chicago Region’s FastConnect locations. Partners available at launch for the Oracle Cloud Chicago Region include Megaport, Equinix, CoreSite, and Digital Realty.

Customers, Partners, and Analysts Welcome the New Oracle Cloud Chicago Region

“Zebra Technologies’ products, software, services, and solutions help businesses solve complex problems using data and analytics to digitize and automate their workflows on the front line of business. We look forward to the Oracle Cloud Chicago Region giving us the cloud infrastructure we need to drive our business so we can help organizations around the world sense what’s happening in their operations, analyze that data to deliver insights, and act on those insights to make smarter decisions in near real time,” said Matt Ausman, chief information officer, Zebra Technologies.

“The days of the cloud being a ‘one-size-fits-all’ proposition are long gone, and Oracle recognizes that its customers want freedom of choice in their cloud deployments. By continuing to establish cloud regions at a rapid pace in strategic locations such as the U.S. Midwest, Oracle is demonstrating a commitment to giving its customers as many options as possible to leverage the cloud on their terms,” said Chris Kanaracus, research director, IDC.

“The Chicago metropolitan area is a global hub for key industries such as financial services and manufacturing. The new Oracle Cloud region will provide clients with more choices for their cloud deployments, and we look forward to collaborating with Oracle to help organizations in the Midwest more quickly and easily harness the business-changing benefits of the cloud,” said Samia Tarraf, Oracle Business Group global lead, Accenture.

Oracle Cloud’s Rapidly-Growing Global Footprint

Oracle provides a broad and consistent set of cloud services across 41 commercial and government cloud regions in 22 countries on five continents to serve its growing global customer base. OCI currently operates 34 commercial regions and seven government regions, in addition to multiple dedicated and national security regions.

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), Chicago (United States), Toronto (Canada), Montreal (Canada), São Paolo (Brazil), Vinhedo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile), Querétaro (Mexico)
• Europe: Frankfurt (Germany), London (United Kingdom), Newport, Wales (United Kingdom), Zürich (Switzerland), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Marseille (France), Stockholm (Sweden), Milan (Italy), La Courneuve, Paris (France), Madrid (Spain)
• Middle East: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi and Dubai (U.A.E), Jerusalem (Israel)
• Africa: Johannesburg (South Africa)
• Government: Two general U.S. Government regions, three U.S. Department of Defense specific Government regions, several U.S. National Security regions, and two United Kingdom Government regions (London and Newport, Wales)

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the Oracle Cloud Regions
• Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Join Oracle's CIO and SVP of OCI Platforms, Jae Evans, on January 18th as she explores the benefits of the Oracle Cloud Chicago Region and its impact on organizations in the Midwest. Register for the virtual event here.