Oracle has announced three new government cloud regions that have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (L5 PATO) for cloud security,

The regions - Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois - have all passed security requirements which allow federal customers to use them. The announcement follows Oracle's achievement of FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) certification, which assures government customers that its products are secure enough for use.

These authorizations come after Oracle lost out to Microsoft Azure for the US military's JEDI contract, which could be worth $10 billion, a decision which Oracle is appealing. Oracle has, however, won some US defense work.

Some defense work

By the end of 2020, Oracle plans to have 36 "Generation 2" online and these will include more government regions (Generation 2 of Oracle's cloud was launched in 2018). “US DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the announcement. 

The new IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and Bare Metal Compute (CPU and GPU), Storage (including archive, block, and object storage), Database, Identity and Access Management, Key Management Service, Load Balancer, and Exadata Cloud Service.

Despite missing out on the JEDI contract, Oracle recently won a contract to manage a portion of the Department of Defense's human resources work on its Oracle Cloud. Infrastructure service, which has received third party certifications for government-level security.

The company says there are more than 500 government organizations using Oracle technology, including the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the US Air Force.