Data residency for Canadian organizations, including those in the public sector, had led to another data center opening its doors in Toronto.
Oracle is following on the heels of CentriLogic and Microsoft, among others, by announcing its Canadian data center is up and running to support localized data residency for its cloud services. The initiative was first announced in November, said Mario Meroni, area VP for Oracle Canada Public Sector, driven in large part to the public sector looking to leverage SaaS in the cloud to provide efficient delivery of applications while at the same time assuaging concerns of the public over security and data compliance. “Residency has turned into a big issue,” he said. Private sector enterprises also have their own compliance requirements and shareholders to satisfy.
There was also significant demand from private enterprises, added Meroni, but for the public sector in particular, data residency in Canada has become table stakes when it comes to selecting cloud services and a data center. “It’s extremely material as we go to market,” he said. “It’s table stakes for a lot of customers.”
It’s the first data center for Oracle in Canada, although as part of its opening the company is setting up shop in the western part of the country to offer redundancy. The data center will support its Human Capital Management Cloud, Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud and Customer Experience Cloud. Meroni said Oracle has built up a solid pipeline of customers who want take advantage of a Canadian-based data center for their Oracle applications. “Long term it is going to be a base we grown on for the Canadian market.”
Earlier this week, CentriLogic announced a brand new facility in Mississauga, also citing data residency as a key driver for its opening. The company already has locations in Canada, but was looking to build more capacity to serve larger enterprises in the same manner it does with Fortune 500 companies south of the border. That goal required a data center that could handle today’s power consumption and compute density needs.
In early June, Microsoft announced it was building two data centers in Canada to support its customers cloud computing requirements and is spending more than US$10 billion a year on Azure data centers. Other recent launches include facilities owned by Terago, among others. In early 2014, IBM announced it spend more than US$1.2 billion to significantly expand its cloud computing services, including building a new data center in Toronto.
When commenting on the recent CentriLogic announcement, Mark Schrutt, IDC Canada’s research VP for services and enterprise applications, companies such as Microsoft opening data centers does have a positive impact on the overall market, as once they deliver services in Canada and it is proven out, interest in cloud will grow and other providers will be able to sell more as well.
In December, Oracle a cloud development facility in downtown Toronto’s downtown to increase its cloud software development team and a focus on advancing Oracle Marketing Cloud.