Swiss telco Sunrise is set to migrate 1,000 databases to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer as part of a modernization project.

The Oracle platform is a combined hardware and software offering that brings cloud capabilities to a company's own data center.

The decision is part of a wider consolidation and modernization project, as reported by Inside IT.

According to Sunrise's director of IT, Stephen Dowling, the telco didn't want to move completely to the cloud. By keeping the data on-premises, meeting data protection requirements is simpler, while the solution still offers the flexibility and improved monitoring that comes with the cloud.

Dowling estimated that the migration should be completed by the end of 2025 - a total of around 18 months of work - to "upgrade all the databases and consolidate them in our two data centers."

The company has thus far migrated around 20 percent of those databases, starting with the development and test environments. Next on the list is the productive environments.

Sunrise CIO Anna Maria Blengino said in a statement: "We need to simplify our technological infrastructure in order to be able to respond more agilely to the evolving needs of our customers."

Sunrise is also a known user of Red Hat, having worked with the open-source solutions provider in 2020 to build a hybrid cloud-ready platform.

In July 2024, Sunrise's owner Liberty Global confirmed that it was looking to spin off the company in Q4 of this year.

Earlier this month, Infosys released a report that found that the telecoms industry was significantly increasing cloud spending to "boost operational efficiencies, scalability, and 5G deployment."

According to the report, telecommunications companies are expected to spend around $32 million annually on cloud services, and 77 percent of telco executive consider their cloud migration efforts to be "very or extremely effective."

The report notes that telecom companies were previously slow to adopt cloud due to "migration complexities and security concerns," but this has since shifted.

Philippines-based Globe Telecom is among the telcos to adopt the cloud, having migrated its IT environment to Amazon Web Services. Other telcos to have made the jump include M1 in Singapore, and Brazil's TIM.