Oracle launched its SD-WAN orchestrator into the cloud this week in a bid to speed deployments, simplify management, and ease multicloud pain points.

The ever-so-creatively named Oracle SD-WAN Orchestration Cloud delivers the company's SD-WAN orchestrator as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“This is our first step in developing and maturing the cloud service. It's literally taking our on-premises orchestration and uplifting it into a multi-tenanted, SaaS service,” explained Brian Kracik, senior director of product marketing for Oracle's enterprise communications and cloud services team. “You don't need that on-premise hardware anymore. You're now doing it through a terminal leveraging our SaaS service.”

This approach, he adds, has numerous benefits for enterprises and managed service providers as it lowers the barrier to entry and provides enhanced security built into Oracle's cloud platform.

Oracle isn't abandoning its on-premises orchestrator. Instead, the idea is to offer customers greater flexibility by eliminating the requirement to build, deploy, and maintain an on-premises SD-WAN orchestrator. Customers can still use an on-premises orchestrator or even run it in the cloud of their choice, Kracik said.

Gateway to Multicloud

However, putting the orchestration layer in the cloud is only half the story.

“Just like our on-premises controller, we can do cloud orchestration and apply all these SD-WAN principals to the multicloud scenario,” Kracik said. “This is really important as we're seeing so many more enterprises [migrate to the cloud], and they're not just using one cloud, it's multiple cloud services.”

As customers adopt a multicloud strategy, “we get to manage and orchestrate, from the cloud, those connectivity layers that are now, primarily multicloud oriented,” he explained.

The same way the SD-WAN is used to connect branch offices to a central data center, the orchestrator can connect offices to any number of public clouds.

Kracik notes that this is just the first step in Oracle's multicloud strategy. While the orchestrator can get customers to the front door of a particular cloud provider, Oracle has yet to deploy on-ramps into the specific workloads and applications.

Oracle SD-WAN Orchestration Cloud is available starting this week.