Oracle has announced plans to establish two new Oracle Cloud Regions in Morocco, aimed at providing enterprise cloud services to organizations across Africa. The new regions, located in Casablanca and Settat, will enable Oracle customers and partners to migrate critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), ensuring compliance with local regulations and facilitating digital transformation.
Boosting Digital Transformation in Morocco
The initiative underscores Oracle’s commitment to Africa and is expected to drive the digital modernization of enterprises, startups, universities, and investors in Morocco and the broader region. The project aligns with Morocco's strategic goals to bolster its digital government initiatives and foster greater innovation.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish the new cloud regions was signed by key Moroccan officials and Oracle leaders during GITEX Africa 2024. The signatories included Mr. Mohcine Jazouli, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of Investment, Convergence, and Evaluation of Public Policies; Ms. Ghita Mezzour, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform; and Mr. Ali Seddiki, General Director of the Moroccan Agency for the Development of Investments and Exports (AMDIE).
Expanding Cloud Capabilities
Oracle's planned cloud regions will offer a comprehensive suite of services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave Database Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI Generative AI service, and OCI AI Infrastructure. These services will support organizations in modernizing applications, enhancing resilience, and exploring new markets.
Richard Smith, Executive Vice President of Technology, EMEA at Oracle, emphasized Morocco's unique growth potential, noting its strong business and cultural ties with West Africa, Maghreb, and Europe. The new cloud regions are poised to serve as a foundation for the Moroccan government's efforts to modernize public services and better serve its citizens.
OCI's Advanced AI and Cloud Solutions
Oracle is the only hyperscaler capable of delivering a full suite of over 100 cloud services across dedicated, public, and hybrid cloud environments globally. The upcoming regions in Morocco will provide access to OCI's advanced AI infrastructure and cloud capabilities, enabling low-latency access to cloud services and enhancing business continuity through redundancy and disaster recovery features.
The regions will also help organizations meet Morocco's data residency requirements and leverage OCI's sovereign AI capabilities, providing greater control over data and computing infrastructure while ensuring compliance with digital sovereignty frameworks.
Oracle’s Distributed Cloud Strategy
Oracle's distributed cloud strategy includes dedicated, hybrid, public, and multicloud environments. Customers can run all OCI cloud services in their data centers with OCI Dedicated Region, while partners can resell OCI cloud services using Oracle Alloy. Additionally, Oracle operates separate government clouds for the U.S., UK, and Australia, and isolated cloud regions for U.S. national security purposes.
Hybrid cloud services are delivered on-premises through Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Compute Cloud@Customer, with deployments managed in over 60 countries. Public cloud regions cater to organizations of all sizes, including those requiring strict EU sovereignty controls. Multicloud options such as Oracle Database@Azure and MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Microsoft Azure provide customers with the flexibility to combine capabilities across different cloud platforms.
For more information, visit the official announcement on oracle.com.
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