Microsoft and Oracle join forces in the cloud

Database heavyweights Oracle and Microsoft have announced a partnership between their respective cloud platforms, enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

As an Oracle Gold and Microsoft Gold partner, we commonly work with organisations running both Oracle and SQL Server workloads and this announcement will be of particular interest to them, as it brings with it a set of new capabilities:

  • Connect Azure and Oracle Cloud seamlessly, allowing on-premises datacentres to be extended to both clouds.
  • Unified identity and access management, via a unified single sign-on experience and automated user provisioning, to manage resources across Azure and Oracle Cloud.
  • Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications on Azure with Oracle databases deployed in Oracle Cloud. The same Oracle applications will also be certified to run on Azure with Oracle databases in Oracle Cloud.
  • A collaborative support model to help IT organisations deploy these new capabilities while enabling them to leverage existing customer support relationships and processes.
  • Oracle Database will continue to be certified to run in Azure on various operating systems, including Windows Server and Oracle Linux.

Connecting Azure and Oracle Cloud through network and identity interoperability makes lift-and-improve migrations seamless. This partnership delivers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between two clouds, while continuing to provide first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies.

By enabling customers to run one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within the Oracle Cloud, the partnership delivers a highly optimised, best-of-both-clouds experience.

In addition to providing interoperability for customers running Oracle software on Oracle Cloud and Microsoft software on Azure, it enables new and innovative scenarios like running Oracle E-Business Suite or Oracle JD Edwards on Azure against an Oracle Autonomous Database running on Exadata infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud.

You can read the full press releases at these links: