Digital Realty added direct connections to Oracle Cloud in 14 metro areas, giving customers private access to the public cloud in 59 of its data centers.

The company’s global data center footprint includes more than 180 properties across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Digital Realty’s Service Exchange connections, through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect, are available at its facilities in Ashburn, Virginia; Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Dallas; London; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Seattle; and Silicon Valley.

Digital Realty launched Service Exchange, which allows companies to bypass the public Internet and establish private connections, in November 2016. It offers direct connections to other public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Megaport’s software-defined networking (SDN) interconnection platform also supports Digital Realty’s Service Exchange. In addition to connecting to multiple public clouds, the platform allows Digital Realty’s customers to establish private connections with other participants of the platform and other data centers on the connected network from a single interface.

Digital Realty decided to partner with Megaport because its SDN fabric “had all the capabilities we were looking for from a technical and platform perspective,” said Sean Iraca, VP of service innovation at Digital Realty. “We definitely wanted our platform to be SDN-enabled, to be able to turn virtual circuits up within a minute, and get that consumption model in line with cloud-consumption models — order through a portal, pay for what I use, spike up or turn it down as needed. [Enterprises] want that flexibility.”

Data centers’ ability to provide these private, direct connections are becoming increasingly important to enterprises as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. It gives enterprises a more secure line compared to connecting over the public Internet, and it enables a faster, low-latency connection.

Digital Realty’s top competitor, Equinix, offers a similar service that allows its data center customers to connect directly to each other, as well as to public clouds and other service providers. Megaport also offers a similar service through its data center partner footprint across the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe.

Because Digital Realty is a Megaport data center partner, “we stay at parity with Megaport,” Iraca said. “Whenever a new service provider is available on Megaport’s infrastructure, it’s available for our customers as well.”

Adding Oracle Cloud is part of Digital Realty’s plan to “add cloud density” to its data centers, Iraca said.

“Oracle is certainly one of the top service destinations,” he added.“Oracle has a massive install base of legacy services, and they are working as a company to migrate them to the cloud. We’re becoming a place for customers to migrate services with things like Service Exchange. We are working together to solve these hybrid cloud use cases.”