Oracle has launched its Cloud at Customer solution in South Africa.

The company says the solution addresses what it describes as one of the main obstacles to cloud adoption: data privacy concerns related to where the data is stored.

According to Oracle, organisations are eager to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from being able to adopt the technology.

"Oracle Cloud at Customer is a direct response to the remaining barriers to cloud adoption and turning those obstacles into opportunities by letting customers choose the location of their cloud services," said Francois-Xavier Leclercq - Senior Vice President Business Development EMEA & APAC applications.

Leclercq says the service enables customers to leverage the company's cloud services, including SaaS, Paas, and IaaS, both on their premises and in our cloud.

"Oracle fully manages and maintains the infrastructure at customers' premises so that customers can focus on using the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services. This is the same cloud infrastructure platform that powers the Oracle Cloud globally," the company explains.

PaaS service categories include database application development, analytics, and identity management, while SaaS covers EPR, HCM, CRM and supply chain management.

The company has also released Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine, an optimised system delivering a production-grade Hadoop and Spark platform.

Oracle Cloud at Customer is based on providing organisations with access to the company's public cloud services but retaining control over these services in their own datacentres.

"This is the only offering from a major public cloud vendor that delivers a stack that is 100 percent compatible with the public cloud but available on-premises, ensuring that customers get the same experience and the latest innovations and benefits using it in their datacentres as in the public cloud," the company continues.

Oracle is also focused on cloud adoption in Kenya, and has identified telecommunications, finance institutions and public bodies as top adopters.

ITWeb Africa's Kenya correspondent Vincent Matinde spoke with Serge Blockmans, Sales Director at Oracle, who said:

"Industries globally are undergoing major changes in their business model and cloud solutions and particularly cloud applications give companies agility to react to those transformations. In Kenya we are particularly good with regards to network infrastructure that is a major enabler for the uptake of cloud solutions."

Telcos expect a boom in cloud adoption in Africa in the next few years.

At AfricaCom 2017 Liquid Telecom referenced its African Cloud report 2017 in which Jon Tullett, Research Manager of IT Services Africa at the IDC, said: "Across Africa, the cloud has been underplayed, and was slow to take off - often due to lack of infrastructure, data protection concerns, and conservative investment strategies. Now, concerns about security and data sovereignty are starting to fall away in the face of consumer cloud acceptance and the advent of stricter legislation.