The demand for cloud computing has surged massively in the Middle East since the outbreak of the pandemic, and companies like Oracle are happy to meet it.

Earlier this week, the Texas-based company announced the opening of its second cloud region in the United Arab Emirates, providing local businesses with global, secure, and high-performance environments that they can use to support their workloads.

The new cloud region is located in Abu Dhabi, and, together with the older Dubai region, it supports the UAE’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Strategy.

“With the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Regions, we have the required cloud infrastructure for organizations across public and private sectors, including SMBs, to accelerate their digital transformation,” said Oracle’s executive vice president of Technology for the EMEA region, Richard Smith.

According to Oracle, the main benefits of the Abu Dhabi Region for local businesses include easier data compliance, reduced costs, enhanced performance, superior resiliency, higher availability, improved customer experiences, and more. Because the region is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), new customers should be able to migrate existing workloads with ease.

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Oracle is a major player in the Middle East, and its clients include everyone from Abu Dhabi Customs to Emaar Properties to Mashreq Bank. Jae Sook Evans, Oracle’s chief information officer, said that the Middle East is a priority region for the company.

Oracle aims to operate a network of at least 44 cloud regions globally by the end of 2022. Currently, it has 34 cloud regions globally, with new regions also set to open in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Its largest competitors in the Middle East include IBM, Amazon Web Services, SAP, and Alibaba Cloud.

The cloud market in the Middle East is forecasted to reach over $8.79 Billion by 2022, up from $2.17 Billion in 2016.