As you probably know, cloud adoption rates are high, with public cloud adoption rates higher than private cloud and many organisations planning a multi cloud strategy. Rightscale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Report found 94% of respondents were using cloud services, 91% have adopted public cloud and 72% private cloud. 69% use at least one public and one private cloud.
But what are the main use cases for cloud and how can businesses find the right cloud for their requirements?
Many businesses use the cloud for a specific application or workload first, then gradually move more. Application development and testing is well suited, as is big data analytics, because of the cloud’s burstable nature. Backup, archiving, DR and high availability can be run simply and reliably. For businesses that need to refresh infrastructure or consolidate multiple applications, the cloud offers a flexible and viable option. Data warehousing requires capacity and scalability, making the cloud an obvious choice.
For most businesses, flexibility, security, performance, availability, cost and simplicity are high on the list of requirements of any cloud deployment, so how do they find all of these?
Oracle Cloud has all the answers.
Flexibility: Oracle Cloud provides customers with an end to end cloud offering, spanning infrastructure, platform and application layers, with integrated consumption models and centralised management. It is flexible and can be deployed as a private cloud, hybrid cloud or public cloud model, which are interchangeable. In fact, Oracle actively encourages a hybrid cloud approach, with pre-packaged applications and tools for rapid provisioning, migration, centralised management and integration.
With Oracle Cloud, applications run identically, whether deployed in the cloud or on premises. As a truly flexible cloud option, Oracle Cloud can run different operating systems and any application, not just Oracle applications. In addition, open standards mean IT teams can develop the integrations they need.
Security: Oracle Cloud is secure, with physical data centre access controls, data encryption, and a multi-layered security strategy which covers all layers of the technology stack. If public cloud really is a no-go for security or regulatory reasons, then Oracle Cloud at Customer is a truly unique option which allows customers to deploy an instance of Oracle Cloud Machine or Oracle Database Exadata Cloud on site. As a subscription model, the deployment is behind the customer’s firewall and Oracle handle installation, configuration, patching, lifecycle management, upgrades and monitoring. This fully managed cloud is secure, flexible, fast and cost effective, with options for offsetting on-premises licenses against the costs.
Performance: Oracle Cloud is an enterprise grade cloud, which offers bare metal options which allow applications to be configured to run on dedicated resources. For mission critical applications, Exadata cloud option ensures extreme performance.
Availability: Oracle offers a Maximum Availability Architecture which includes backup, Oracle Real Application Clusters and DR.
Cost: Cost reductions come from moving entire workloads to the cloud and retiring data centres, and from the elastic capacity offered by Oracle Cloud which facilitates cloud bursts without the need to over-provision. Oracle Cloud also provides the tools needed to migrate applications without the need to rewrite.
Simplicity: As you would expect, moving Oracle applications, such as E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server from premises to cloud is straightforward. They can simply be repackaged for a seamless move to the cloud. Oracle also provides the tools to allow VMware and KVM workloads to be lifted and shifted to the cloud with no changes.
However, non-Oracle applications such as Microsoft Windows, IBM WebSphere, Tomcat, JBoss, SQL Server, DB2, Mongo DB, Cassandra, Postgres and Sybase can also be migrated to the cloud with ease.
Before any migration takes place, Oracle offers all the tools needed to estimate the resources organisations will need to maintain current SLAs. Performance management tools will identify and fix issues which could affect performance.
When it comes to the actual migration, Oracle offers cloning tools to seamlessly copy applications to the cloud. For businesses with zero tolerance for downtime, migration is possible with Oracle GoldenGate Cloud service, which uses real time data replication feature to move data in large quantities.
For new deployments, Oracle Enterprise Cloud allows organisations to reduce the steps involved in multitier application deployments, from an average 14 steps on premises, to just 6 steps. Oracle Cloud Marketplace also offers a set of pre-packaged applications for turnkey deployments.
Whilst it might not be as well known as AWS or Azure, Oracle Cloud has been built for the enterprise, with enterprise applications and workloads front and centre. It meets the needs of businesses and should not be overlooked.
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