Zoom Taps Oracle Cloud to Support Dramatic User Surge

Zoom Video Communications has turned to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support its exponential growth, as the video-conferencing platform’s daily users spike to 300 million, up from 200 million, in a few weeks.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeps through the globe, governments have instituted lockdown regulations, resulting in companies and schools introducing remote working policies as a precautionary measure towards combating the spread of the virus.

As an essential ICT service provider that combines video-conferencing, online meetings, chat and mobile collaboration technology to global customers, demand for Zoom’s online video call service has dramatically surged since February.

The California-headquartered software company says it urgently required additional cloud infrastructure capacity, which has seen it select Oracle’s cloud platform, side-stepping Oracle rivals Alphabet’s Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

The video-conferencing company says it selected Oracle for its advantages in performance, scalability and reliability.

Speaking at a virtual media briefing, Zoom CEO and founder Eric S Yuan said, after achieving full production capacity, Zoom is now enabling millions of simultaneous meeting participants on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“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. We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support,” notes Yuan.

Oracle says its second-generation cloud infrastructure will help Zoom scale to continue to deliver an always-on service to its customer base, helping it adapt to its evolving business requirement.

“Video communications has become an essential part of our professional and personal lives, and Zoom has led this industry’s innovation,” says Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

“We are proud to work with Zoom, as both their cloud infrastructure provider and as a customer, while they grow and continue to connect businesses, people and governments around the world.”

The Oracle Cloud offers a suite of integrated applications for sales, service, marketing, human resources, finance, supply chain and automated second-generation infrastructure which features the Oracle Autonomous Database to automate tasks.

According to Catz, Oracle is well-positioned to enable Zoom’s rapid expansion and innovative video communications platform, due to its network architecture and capacity, combined with expertise in security and data centre locations.

Zoom says it is already transferring upwards of seven petabytes of data through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers each day, which is roughly equivalent to 93 years of high-definition video.

Meanwhile, Zoom faced mounting security issues as its user numbers surged, including opening up webcams to spies and sending user data to Facebook.

After multiple security and privacy issues raised by security firms, Yuan apologised to users, and assured them their meetings will be safe and secure after the firm worked around the clock to resolve its security issues.

Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab later commented that Zoom seamlessly handled the tremendous workload increase and quickly reacted to security researchers’ discoveries.