Oracle has announced plans to establish two new Oracle Cloud Regions in Morocco, focused on delivering 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 local regulatory compliance and facilitating digital transformation.
Stimulating digital transformation in Morocco
The initiative underlines 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 objectives to strengthen its digital government initiatives and foster greater innovation.
During GITEX Africa 2024, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish the new cloud regions was signed by key Moroccan officials and Oracle leaders. The signatories included Mr. Mohcine Jazouli, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of Investment, Convergence and Public Policy Evaluation; Ms Ghita Mezzour, Minister Delegate of 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).
Expansion of 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, increasing resilience and exploring new markets.
Richard Smith, Executive Vice President of Technology, EMEA at Oracle, highlighted Morocco’s unique growth potential and noted its strong business and cultural ties with West Africa, the 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 that can deliver a full suite of more than 100 cloud services across dedicated, public and hybrid cloud environments worldwide. Morocco’s emerging regions will provide access to OCI’s advanced AI infrastructure and cloud capabilities, enabling low-latency access to cloud services and improving business continuity through redundancy and disaster recovery features.
The regions will also help organizations meet Moroccan 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 multi-cloud environments. Customers can run all OCI cloud services in their data centers using OCI Dedicated Region, while partners can resell OCI cloud services using Oracle Alloy. In addition, Oracle operates separate government clouds for the US, UK and Australia, and isolated cloud regions for US national security purposes.
Hybrid cloud services are delivered on-premises through Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Compute Cloud@Customer, with deployments managed in more than 60 countries. Public cloud regions are suitable for organizations of all sizes, including those that require strict EU sovereignty controls. Multi-cloud options such as Oracle Database@Azure and MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Microsoft Azure give customers the flexibility to combine capabilities across cloud platforms.
For more information, visit the official announcement at oracle.com.
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