GMO Internet shifts its core databases to Oracle Cloud and trims costs

GMO Internet just pulled the trigger on a major backend overhaul. The company has moved the database foundation behind its flagship services into Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. No corporate fluff here the goal was simple get more flexibility, tighten business continuity, and cut roughly fifteen percent off the IT bill compared to the old on premise setup. The bonus is that the newest Oracle database comes with built-in AI features that the company can actually put to work.

If you know GMO Internet, you know they’ve been in the game since 1995 and sit at the center of Japan’s internet infrastructure scene. They run domains, cloud and rental servers, connectivity, plus a chunk of the ad and media business. As of September 2025 they’re sitting on about nine point five million contracts.

Until now their main services lived on an on premise Oracle Exadata stack. However, the company decided to go with Oracle Exadata Database Service to get improved availability, performance, security, resilience, and cost control. They made the call in February 2024, and by May 2025, the whole thing was absolutely live. A disaster recovery site is also in the works.

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The shift unlocks Oracle’s AI Database tools and GMO Internet is already putting them to use. With Oracle Advanced Compression they cut backup time by about ninety percent which wiped out the monthly scheduling headaches. Running on OCI also means far less manual work on patches and security updates. They can scale CPU to match peak loads which makes change management safer and cleaner. On the business side the elastic capacity lets them handle traffic spikes and prepare for new service rollouts. The coming DR site will double as an analytics engine so they can run heavier analysis without slowing down live systems.

Before this move backup stretched to twenty hours and CPUs were constantly maxed. Monthly processing needed endless adjustments. Memory was already tapped out so adding new databases quickly was almost impossible which held back service expansion. They also had to live with the risk of disasters hitting concentrated systems and the huge cost of building an on premise DR setup not to mention the drag of waiting to use newer tech.

The migration plan laser-focused on keeping Exadata compatibility and avoiding heavy system rewrites. A multitenant architecture now lets them spin up new databases fast while keeping security tight. For security and operations, they’re leaning on Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Data Safe to reinforce monitoring, auditing, and remediation.

Right now GMO Internet is testing a data analysis platform on Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database. They’re also eyeing Select AI for more intuitive decision-making including analysis powered by natural language queries.