Oracle Cloud Infrastrcture Archives

Is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ready for Use in Your Multi-cloud Strategy?

by Craig Andrews May 31st 2023

As digital transformation efforts accelerate, most businesses have realised that there is no one-size-fits-all cloud platform and are adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Despite vendor claims, none of the major providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) offers the complete package.

To leverage the most appropriate and effective technologies (and maximise potential savings), organisations must adopt a multi-cloud strategy. The ability to ‘cherry pick’ the most appropriate functions and features allows for the construction of a platform optimised to the specific needs of the organisation.

So why should Oracle Cloud make your shortlist of potential partners? Here are three great reasons:

1. Oracle Cloud is designed for mission-critical workloads

For digital transformation to be truly effective, your business must be able to ‘cloudify’ its mission-critical operations. By offering bare metal servers, Oracle Cloud makes it extremely easy to lift and shift legacy applications and workloads into a hosted platform – but that’s only part of the story.

In recognition of the multi-cloud reality, Oracle has negotiated an alliance with Microsoft. This vendor partnership simplifies the process of deploying mission-critical workloads across the multi-cloud, enabling the construction of best-of-breed applications and services.

2. Oracle operates an ‘open’ cloud

Vendor lock-in is a common complaint about cloud vendors. Extricating data, or even moving it between clouds comes at an additional cost, often quite significant, as a way to discourage customers from changing service – or even building a multi-cloud operation.

Oracle acknowledges and supports the reality of the multi-cloud by encouraging openness. There are no charges for offboarding for example – if a customer wants to leave the platform entirely, they are free to do so without additional cost. This will help the 52% of businesses who report that an inability to move workloads between clouds has created barriers to achieving their strategic goals.

Oracle also applies open standards like Kubernetes and Kafka, helping to further reduce technology and vendor lock-in. In this way, customers are enabled to build the applications and services their business needs, without compromise.

3. Oracle Cloud simplifies hybrid operations

Having realised the benefits of on-demand scalability and resourcing in the cloud, many businesses are now seeking to replicate the same elastic capabilities in their on-prem data centres. This is in addition to demands for more generalised hybrid cloud operations.

Again, Oracle is ahead of the game, introducing technologies like Oracle Cloud@Customer which allows users to spread database operations between on-prem and the Oracle Cloud. Similarly, Dedicated Region provides all of Oracle’s public cloud services natively in the local data centre, available on a consumption-based billing model – just like the cloud.

Oracle Cloud effectively blurs the boundaries between cloud and local services to deliver a consistent, robust, scalable and future-ready platform for digital transformation. And that’s before you consider the back-office engineering required to deliver 99.99% uptime and a 4-minute monthly maintenance routine for maximum reliability.

To learn more about how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure fits into your multi-cloud future, please get in touch .

Using Oracle to Deliver on the Promise of Modern Cloud Economics

by Craig Andrews May 21st 2023

Cloud services are supposed to help cut costs, enable digital transformation and automatically scale in line with demand. However, many early cloud adopters have become disillusioned; they know they should be achieving these goals, but in reality are not fully meeting expectations.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been designed to close those gaps and to deliver on the promise of cloud economics. And this is how OCI achieves that goal:

Flexible services

OCI has been built to give customers greater control over their virtual environment, thereby helping to reduce costs. Virtual machine instances can be adjusted to include a range of CPU technologies and speeds with fully configurable RAM options too. Importantly, smaller workloads can be scaled-down to make use of burstable instances that use as little as 12.5% of the CPU power, further containing costs.

Other important configuration options include preemptible instances that cost 50% less than an on-demand equivalent. And the Flexible Load Balancer offers elastic scaling to ensure you never pay for the bandwidth you are not using.

Autonomous services

Optimising security and performance is a significant administrative overhead. To help ensure your cloud-based systems are properly protected, OCI employs automated services to self-tune operating systems and apply security patches without causing downtime.

Diverse compute instances

In recognition that not all workloads are the same, Oracle has expanded the range of CPU offerings available in OCI. With a choice of Intel, AMD and ARM, customers have access to high-performance virtual servers for every application, optimised to their preferred CPU architecture.

Hybrid and multi-cloud

Hybrid cloud will remain the standard deployment for most businesses into the foreseeable future, and Oracle OCI has been built with that reality in mind. Cloud@Customers brings OCI tools and services on-premise, including managed cloud services and Oracle Fusions SaaS.

Cloud@Customer allows users to take advantage of all the same cloud features – flexibility, pay-as-you-billing, scalability – in their own data centre. The Microsoft Azure Interconnect enables multi-cloud operations so that users can select the hosted platform that best meets the needs of a specific application, ensuring they realise the best of all available options.

Migration assistance

Moving on-premise workloads to the cloud can be complex – particularly when a business lacks sufficient expertise in-house. Oracle provides free migration assistance to OCI customers to help plug these gaps and ensure that cloud-based systems are fully optimised to deliver expected business benefits.

Commercial terms

Unlike some cloud providers, Oracle applies the same pricing structure across the world. This means that customers can accurately calculate their usage costs, no matter where they – or their hosted systems – are based.

Equally important is the “bring your own license” program that allows customers to apply their on-premise licenses to hosted services. In this way, they do not end up paying twice for the services they use.

Conclusion

Oracle describes Oracle Cloud Infrastrcture as ‘second generation’ cloud because it has been designed to overcome many of the frustrations and limitations that have plagued other platforms. Although later to the cloud marketplace than other providers (particularly Amazon and Microsoft), OCI has used that ‘lag’ to create the ideal platform for helping businesses realise the full value of cloud economics.

If you’d like to know more about Oracle OCI and how it can help your organisation better meet its cloud goals, please get in touch .

Your 12-point checklist for choosing Oracle infrastructure

by Craig Andrews May 12th 2023

So, you have chosen Oracle as the platform on which your digital transformation program will take place. So what does your Oracle infrastructure need to provide to make that happen?

This checklist will help ensure you choose the right hardware to power your plans.

Improving the customer (and user) experience

Customer loyalty may be dead, but every customer still expects a high-quality experience. To ensure you can meet their expectations, you must deliver:

Maximum availability (it’s not just data centre managers who demand 99.9999% uptime these days)
Fast application response times
24/7 operations
Consistent data protection on-prem and in the cloud to meet compliance obligations.

To meet these goals, your Oracle infrastructure must offer:

All-flash storage for maximum performance
Proactive monitoring and predictive analytics to optimise operations
Fault tolerance and automated fail-over as standard
Automatic recovery to prevent downtime
Non-disruptive software updates and hardware maintenance to properly protect systems, data and users.

Without these features, your infrastructure is unlikely to provide the security, resilience and performance required for an exceptional customer experience.

Simplifying operations and lowering TCO

Successful digital transformation requires improved access to data to empower better strategic decision-making. But at the same time, it should also help to improve efficiency and lower operating costs. Ultimately you are looking to:

Reduce management complexity
Eliminate guesswork when dealing with technical issues
Reduce TCO.

So what does your Oracle infrastructure have to offer to meet these goals?

Unified architecture with built-in automation to simplify management
Integrated data protection to simplify backup and recovery
Native cloud integration to support hybrid operations
Automated capacity monitoring and proactive issue monitoring to help identify and resolve issues more quickly
Quality of Service configurations to prioritise mission-critical applications and to scale resources automatically as demand changes
Tools to help you understand and manage cloud resource consumption and cost
Data deduplication and compression to maximise storage capacity and efficiency.

Again, any Oracle infrastructure option that does not provide these features as standard will probably not be able to deliver the efficiency and cost savings you need.

Conclusion

In all reality, there are very few platforms capable of delivering all of these requirements. And although there may be lower-cost alternatives available, these will not tick all the boxes – indeed, the up-front capital investment savings may come at the cost of future gains that can only be realised by a market-leading solution.

To learn more about choosing Oracle infrastructure that will help you meet your digital transformation goals – and which meets all the requirements of this checklist – please give us a call.

4 Questions you must answer when choosing Oracle infrastructure

by Craig Andrews March 13th 2023

Your organisation may have committed its IT operational future to Oracle – but that is just part of the challenge. Now you must select infrastructure that delivers optimal performance for your Oracle estate.

Here are four questions to answer that will help you make the smartest choice as you consider your options.

1. How will the infrastructure be deployed?

Oracle applications are often just as ‘at home’ in the cloud as they are on-premise – or in a hybrid combination of both. There are distinct benefits for each physical location and you need to choose the deployment option that best suits your goals.

Ultimate performance and control are found with on-premise deployments – scalability and provisioning simplicity in the cloud. Hybrid provides a little of both.

What you hope to achieve will determine where your Oracle infrastructure should be located.

2. Will the solution stimulate innovation?

Digital transformation is intended to help an organisation better apply data to their business challenges. But as the name implies, change empowered by innovation is critical.

Your Oracle infrastructure must enable and encourage innovation so that your business has a platform on which to build new services and processes. And it needs to be able to do so more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively to head off your better-provisioned competitors.

3. Will the solution deliver a consistent customer experience?

An exceptional customer experience now sits at the heart of business success. The better the experience, the happier your customers are, and the more likely they are to return.

The experience has to be excellent every single time. And it’s not just external customers either – your employees also need timely access to information and applications to increase productivity and speed of business.

All of this means you need Oracle infrastructure that is performant, stable and reliable.

4. Will the solution make operations simpler (and cheaper)?

Infrastructure complexity creates technical debt as ‘keeping the lights’ on consumes more of your budget every year. Worse still, technical debt reduces the cash available for investment in strategic projects that will help your business grow.

As you plan for the future, choose Oracle infrastructure that simplifies operations to reduce the total cost of ownership. Making the right strategic choice now will provide more opportunities for growth and innovation in future. Not only will you free up more of your budget for strategic spending, but you will also release more of your people to focus on growth-related projects too.

As you consider the future of your Oracle infrastructure, answering these four questions will help you select the best platform for your needs. In our next article, we’ll look at some of the key reasons why choosing Oracle infrastructure matters for stimulating innovation.

Until then, feel free to contact the WTL team team for further guidance – we’re always happy to help!