The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) is set to move its on-premises workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The NCIA, which is the alliance’s technology and cybersecurity hub, defends the alliance’s networks, providing secure and interoperable communications and information systems.

Oracle secured a deal to support its mission-critical workloads, with NCIA systems to leverage OCI’s sovereign cloud solutions, enabling the agency to meet its requirements for data residency and operational controls.

Red Reply, Shield Reply, and Thales will oversee the OCI integration into NATO systems, ensuring end-to-end data security throughout the associated workload migration, while Proximus will deliver advanced networking capabilities.

“OCI will help the NCIA manage, analyze, and protect their data while also giving them more control and peace of mind where data is stored and where workloads run,” Richard Smith, EVP of technology and general manager at Oracle EMEA, explained.

“With OCI, NCIA will be able to take advantage of the latest cloud and AI innovations to modernize its technology infrastructure without compromising the security of its mission-critical data,” Alexandre Bottero, VP of network and infrastructure systems at Thales, added.

NATO’s decision to pick Oracle for its cloud infrastructure comes as the firm is making sizable strides. The company's recent earnings showed cloud revenue jumped by 27% year over year to $7.2 billion, while cloud infrastructure revenue surged 54% to $3.34 billion.

The contract win also comes after the firm was named a leader in Gartner’s latest analysis of distributed hybrid infrastructure providers.

Its OCI offerings were described as being “well-suited” to handle AI applications due to being built on a high-speed, remote direct memory access (RDMA)-based network.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant analysis, however, found Oracle lacked a native generative AI model, with OCI instead focusing on delivering large-scale compute services for AI model builders and enterprises.