Tech vendors keep on innovating new technologies and solutions to improve businesses. Since businesses started embracing cloud services, the number of vendors offering such services has increased. While some vendors struggle to meet the demands of their customers, others have flourished and continue to provide better features to keep their customers happy.
 
At the same time, customers also want vendors to give them the tools they need. Which is why most tech companies also have personalised approaches to their customers ensuring they build a relationship that can last for some time.
 
Now, as businesses continue their transformation journey to the cloud, there are still some industries that have concerns. These concerns normally involve regulations or the sensitivity of the data they’re working on. While they do admit that cloud services would improve their business, regulations and compliance rules keep them from jumping over to a fully cloud-based system.
 
This is where the hybrid cloud comes in. Businesses can have the benefits of public cloud computing such as flexibility, scalability and cost efficiencies with the lowest possible risk of data exposure. Almost all cloud vendors now agree that hybrid cloud is the way forward for organisations.
 
While there are a number of vendors to choose from, AWS and Oracle are two interesting companies to look at in their approach towards the hybrid cloud. AWS launched Outposts some time ago and is now fully available in most parts of the world. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service where AWS delivers pre-configured hardware and software to the customer's on-premises data centre or co-location space to run applications in a cloud-native manner, without having to operate out of AWS data centres.
 
On the other hand, we have Oracle. Considered one of the elders of technology, Oracle recently announced the Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, a fully managed private cloud that brings all of Oracle’s cloud services into customers’ data centres. It’s a viable alternative to AWS Outposts.
 
We recently spoke to representatives from both AWS and Oracle who shared with us why their product is better.
 
According to Paul Chen, Head of Solutions Architect, ASEAN at AWS, some businesses-critical applications are sensitive to latency, and variability in latency. They need to run on-premises to respond to events with extremely small millisecond latency to ensure smooth and predictable operations. Also, with computing power now shifting to the Edge, exponential data generated brings data integrity concerns.
 
These customers have data-intensive workloads that collect and harness terabytes of data a day and require a transmission on the cloud that can be expensive and wasteful at times. Customers want to have better control of their data by leveraging cloud services such as AI and ML frameworks, but also have the ability to process the data on-premises.
 
Meanwhile, Cherian Varghese, Regional Managing Director of ASEAN & SAGE, Oracle explained that businesses face three main challenges in their transformation journey – compliance, governance and auditing. Driven by strong customer demand, Oracle's Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is the industry’s first fully managed cloud region that brings all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud applications, to customer data centres. Simply put, it brings all the capabilities of an Oracle Public cloud region available on-premises.
 
So Which Is the Better Option?
 
While we at DSA believe both vendors are offering the best they can, we decided to lay out the details of their services and let you guys decide yourselves which is the better option for your organisation.

Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Engineering has explained in detailed more about the differences with AWS Outposts in a blog post which can be read here. He also compared the Dedicated Cloud with Azure Stack Hub.
 
We reached out to AWS for some comments on Outposts and their views of Oracle’s Dedicated Region. However, they were not able to respond to our queries and opt to not comment on our questions on Outposts.
 
Be it AWS or Oracle, customers want to bring the agility of the public cloud on-premises. And it seems that AWS and Oracle have both delivered that. While their customer reach and market share may be different, both vendors have successful customers that are using their solutions and are satisfied with them.
 
At the end of the day, both vendors may have advantages and disadvantages to their solutions. As these solutions are based on customer demands, the customer themselves will eventually be the judge and know which of the two above meets their criteria.