Zoom Chooses Oracle for its Cloud Service

Zoom keeps on winning. This time, the video conferencing platform went over Amazon, Google and Microsoft and chose Oracle to provide its cloud infrastructure service to handle the huge traffic of users who migrated to this tool in an effort to keep office operations running.

“We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users,” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. "We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and an unmatched level of support."

The companies did not elaborate on the deal but reported that about 7 million GB of Zoom data per day flows through Oracle servers. Zoom went from having 10 million users in December 2019 to more than 300 million in April.

If Oracle's use of Zoom is successful, it could give the computer technology company a way to demonstrate that its new technology is competitive against rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, which by 4Q19 still ranked first and second in terms of market share.

A Thorn in the Flesh

But not everything has been as sweet as honey for Zoom. At the same time that the company was tasting unexpected success, external users began to break into video conferences. People started to say that data from their devices were being sent to Facebook and allowing meeting hosts to track attendees.

This led companies and governments to ban the use of Zoom. In early April, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted a photo where you could see the ID number of his last Zoom meeting. This led to questions about whether the government should use Zoom for high-level meetings. Meanwhile, Elon Musk banned the use of Zoom for SpaceX meetings for security reasons. NASA has also invited its employees not to use the platform.

In Singapore, the government prohibited schools from using the platform following a "very serious incident" during a lesson. However, weeks later the country resumed its use with "reinforced security measures".

To address this issue, Zoom established a 90-day plan to address security issues. As a result, the company released Zoom 5.0, its latest software update that has reinforced encryption standards.