Small firms with ten or fewer employees account for 96% of all businesses in the UK. Given their importance to the economy, it is critical that larger organisations offer tiny enterprises with support and investment to help them expand and prosper. For this reason, Oracle is expanding resources for UK-based businesses with a new product called Oracle for businesses.
Oracle for Startups currently allows new firms to get the benefits of cloud computing at a low cost, while also supporting their growth with a comprehensive suite of complementary go-to-market capabilities. Oracle for entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom is expanding its resources with a new service to assist thousands more entrepreneurs in leveraging cloud technologies.
This new solution will include additional resources such as cloud credits worth up to £20,000, hands-on technical assistance, executive mentoring, go-to-market resources, and customer interaction.
The goal is to drive growth for UK companies working in one of these four critical areas of development:
- Climate and Sustainability
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
- Health and Wellbeing
- COVID-19 Recovery
Oracle is working extensively on these four areas. For example, the collaboration with Oxford University to uncover new COVID-19 variations. MeVitae, a fast-growing startup, promotes diversity and justice in employment and human resources. And numerous others are enabling great social influence around the world. Because these areas require significant investment and support, Oracle hopes that by providing these additional resources to assist for stimulating even more innovation.
This offering is unique to the United Kingdom. The UK government is committed to assisting the country in rebuilding better, and given the importance of startups to the UK economy, Oracle decided to make this investment in small firms to help accomplish the government’s goal.
In fact, Oracle announced the expansion of its cloud computing presence in the United Kingdom, including a new dedicated dual-region government cloud area and a second commercial cloud region in Newport, Wales on 26, October, 2020. Such resources not only provide a high-performance cloud infrastructure for the UK’s commercial sector, but also contribute to the UK government’s National Data Strategy, which aims to revolutionise the country’s use of data to encourage corporate growth and improve public services. That effort has taken on increased relevance in the wake of the COVID-19 problem, with millions of UK people working from home, a growing desire for more public services to be provided online, and government organisations required to exchange data in timely and transparent ways.
Having a dedicated, private dual-region cloud for exclusive usage by government and defence sector customers, as well as two commercial-only cloud locations in the United Kingdom, promotes data security and sovereignty. Private firms and public sector organisations in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland now have access to a UK region for important workloads and another for disaster recovery. And, by following the security principles outlined by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, both Oracle’s government and commercial clouds have been configured to provide sovereignty over sensitive data, compliance with local data regulations, and, for government cloud users, limited access to only UK citizens with security clearances.
The high-performance Oracle Cloud backbone network connects the government and commercial cloud sites in London and Newport, allowing UK government personnel to access all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Autonomous Database, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.
Oracle is providing the UK government with a dedicated, in-country cloud computing platform from which it can either lift and transfer its on-premises data warehouses and legacy applications to a managed cloud service, or move data directly into cloud apps in a matter of days.
UK businesses and government agencies can use any of Oracle’s cloud services in the commercial and government clouds at the same cost as Oracle’s public cloud offerings.
Oracle is also making it easier for the UK government and businesses to comply with data security standards. Oracle recently introduced new security capabilities such as Oracle Maximum Security Zones, which include preconfigured security controls to help prevent cloud security misconfiguration errors, and Oracle Cloud Guard, which continuously monitors critical data and operations, identifies security threats, and automatically resolves them. Both services, which are incorporated into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, are free of charge in the UK’s dual-region government and commercial clouds.
Oracle’s second-generation HPC services are less expensive than on-premises servers for high-performance computing (HPC) tasks such as modelling and computations involving massive amounts of sensitive data.
Oracle’s dual-region government and commercial clouds in the UK are the company’s 28th global area and the ninth to open in 2020. Oracle manages 21 commercial regions, seven government regions, and several dedicated areas for US intelligence services. Oracle intends to create dual-regions in other countries to assist clients in managing their business-critical workloads, providing catastrophe protection, and meeting in-country data residence requirements. The United States, Canada, the European Union, South Korea, Japan, India, and Australia already have two Oracle Cloud Regions. Oracle intends to establish second cloud regions in Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia; additional EU areas in Italy, Sweden, and France; and new regions in Chile, Singapore, South Africa, and Israel.
More information about Oracle’s work in UK public sector can be found in here
