cloud based solutions west midlands

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

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 .

 

Cloud Based Solutions Birmingham

How Cloud And Data Combine To Drive Business Agility

Because it touches on every aspect of operations, digital transformation is more of an ethos than just an IT project. However, three key factors are crucial to enabling the business agility you need.

1. Data platform simplification

Although hybrid IT allows businesses to build truly flexible systems, it also dramatically increases operational complexity. With virtual machines, containerised applications and SaaS platforms to contend with, achieving complete data visibility is harder than ever.

Choosing a single, integrated platform like Oracle Cloud can help to simplify the data platform and blur boundaries between on- and off-premise systems. Smart management tools then provide line-of-sight across the entire estate – and facilitate new ways of working – to make operations simpler, faster and more effective.

2. Intelligent automation and AI

Your data estate continues to grow exponentially, adding to management overheads. Managing the balance between cost, speed of access and availability is a full-time job.

Again, the smart tools included with the Oracle Cloud can help to streamline management, automatically placing workloads where they offer the best price-performance potential. Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities ensure that the platform continues to learn what your business needs – and to make it happen. This will be particularly important as demand changes; AI will be better able to manage short-term surges in resource demand for instance.

Using automated management tools frees your infrastructure team to focus on the strategic projects which will carry your organisation forwards, rather than diverting resources to keep the lights on.

3. Lower operating costs

A smart data platform in the cloud has the potential to significantly reduce costs – some estimates suggest 55%-100% improvements in price/performance. Service costs also fall by 30%-50% as you outsource responsibility for keeping the hosted platform running.

The savings made can then be re-invested in other activities. From developing next-generation apps to purchasing additional infrastructure that will allow you to achieve your digital transformation goals, the cloud will be an invaluable asset. Assuming you choose the right platform for your current and future needs.

Faster, smarter, cheaper

Cloud investments continue to rise year-on-year – but IT departments also face potential budget reductions in the face of a challenging economic climate. Now more than ever C-suite stakeholders are demanding greater value from investments. This means that IT decision-makers will need to demonstrate operational performance improvements whilst maximising return on investment – or even cost reductions.

The cloud remains the only viable option for achieving these contradictory demands. With the right operating platform, it becomes possible to improve access to data and operational agility and reduce costs too.

To learn more about Oracle Cloud and how it will help your business achieve its digital transformation aspirations, please get in touch.

Data Managment Storage Birmingham

8 Ways Oracle Cloud Destroys The Competition

All cloud platforms are roughly the same right? Wrong. Each has its quirks and nuances, benefits and pitfalls, that may cause problems for your future cloud strategy. So why is Oracle the very best of the bunch?

1. Built to support every app

Many cloud platforms are the result of a vendor scaling out their internal systems to create a public platform, which means mixed results for your enterprise-class apps. Oracle Cloud has been developed towards a single concept – the cloud should support every app.

2. No application re-engineering

Cloud migrations typically involve significant application re-engineering to ensure it works with the target platform – unless you choose Oracle. Oracle Cloud is engineered to be adaptive to your applications, bringing cloud-scale and consumption models to them all.

3. Autonomous management capabilities

The infinite scalability of the cloud quickly increases the complexity of managing hosted operations and systems. To ensure your databases and infrastructure deliver maximum performance, Oracle Cloud includes Oracle Autonomous Linux that self-patches and optimises the OS. Similarly, Oracle Autonomous Database uses machine learning and AI to automate key database management activities to better protect your cloud-based systems.

4. All new hybrid cloud models

Edge computing, data sovereignty and general security concerns have prevented many organisations from moving line-of-business operations to the cloud. To address these issues, Oracle offers a choice of technologies that allow customers to choose where data is physically hosted for maximum security, performance and control – on-premise, in the cloud or anywhere in between.

5. Always-on security

Many cloud platforms treat security as a bolt-on feature, to be added and configured after deployment. Oracle takes a security-first approach, ensuring that controls are enabled from the outset of any project, using automation to prevent human error, reduce complexity and to automate patching for up-to-the-second protection at all times.

6. Predictable cloud costs

The cloud consumption pricing model ensures that organisations only pay for what they use – but that doesn’t mean billing is transparent. Predicting cloud costs is notoriously difficult – unless you choose Oracle Cloud. Oracle charges are both lower and more predictable, using flat-fee pricing for many features that others charge a premium. Oracle database storage and I/O intensive workloads can be as much as 98% cheaper than AWS.

7. Low-code development tools

On many cloud platforms, you will need the services of a data scientist to build the tools which help you make sense of your data. Only Oracle offer a selection of low-code development tools that allow anyone to unleash the power of machine learning to build applications and work smarter.

8. Seamless analytics and BI

Adding analytics and BI to your cloud platforms incurs even more expense – and constant reconfiguration as the environment grows. Oracle Analytics is embedded in the Oracle Cloud, allowing your stakeholders to make sense of patterns and trends – and to make smarter strategic decisions that will help your business grow.

As you can see, Oracle provides many advanced features as standard – although essential, other providers expect you to pay a premium for the same tools. Only Oracle Cloud allows you to build a cloud infrastructure that truly works the way you want – which is why it is the smartest choice for your enterprise applications.

To learn more about Oracle Cloud and why it is the pefect choice for your enterprise applications give the WTL team a call.

5 Stars Representing 5 Reasons to Chose Oracle Cloud

5 (More) Reasons to Choose Oracle Cloud

Despite not being the most popular hosted platform, Oracle Cloud offers some significant benefits to users. The first article in this series outlined five reasons why you should seriously consider making Oracle your platform of choice – and why your competitors are missing out by ignoring it.

But as you might expect, there are more than just five reasons to choose Oracle Cloud. So, here are five more to consider:

1. Cost-optimised platform

Hosted infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS) are billed on a pay-as-you-use basis. So, the more storage or CPU cycles you use, the higher your monthly bill.

Thanks to the infinite scalability of the cloud, you dynamically add resources as they are required, and scale back as demand falls. However, the Oracle cloud typically requires fewer compute servers and block-storage volumes to perform the same tasks – so you achieve the maximum price: performance ratio and save money at the same time.

And thanks to a financially backed, end-to-end SLA, you will also receive compensation if performance is ever impaired.

2. AWS-beating performance

AWS is the most popular cloud platform – but that doesn’t make it the best. Having been designed from scratch to support Oracle databases, the Oracle Cloud is not only 66% faster, but also up to 65% cheaper.

And remember – AWS does not offer native support for Oracle RAC, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing. Less than ideal if your business operations are reliant on Oracle databases.

3. Enterprise power for SMBs

Oracle’s product line is synonymous with enterprise computing, but the cloud is making the same enormous computing power available to SMBs. With scalability as standard, you can expand application development and adoption as the business grows without sacrificing performance or breaking the budget.

4. Microsoft expansion options

AWS tries to tie users into the Amazon ecosystem, making inter-operability time consuming and difficult. But your business almost certainly relies on a best-of-breed collection of systems from multiple vendors.

In recognition of this reality, Oracle and Microsoft have developed a cloud interoperability partnership. This allows customers to use both Oracle and Azure cloud platforms to build a new hosted best-of-breed platform that leverages the unique benefits of each. And cross-cloud interconnect ensures you can move your data wherever you need it without creating a serious technical headache.

5. Your apps, your way

Building a platform for the future requires maximum flexibility and control. By offering a fully integrated application development platform you can build the applications your business needs.

Oracle AppDev has been designed to support your DevOps strategy and to accelerate development and delivery. And with support for containers and cloud-native applications, you can unleash the full power of the cloud for your systems.

Building for the future

The Oracle Cloud may have a smaller user base, but this creates an opportunity for Oracle database users. Faster and cheaper than AWS, with greater flexibility and inter-operability, if you choose Oracle Cloud allows you to build a platform that accelerates the speed of your business -and to build the data-driven applications you really need.

Oracle Cloud Services Five Stars

Not all cloud services are equal – 5 reasons to choose Oracle

Billed as the ultimate flexible IT infrastructure, cloud services should be a completely vanilla platform. In theory, there should be almost nothing but price, service and data centre location to differentiate between services.

The truth is that not all cloud services are created equal. Amazon Web Services may be the industry leader in terms of sales volume, but that doesn’t make it the ideal choice for every application. This is particularly true for Oracle database users.

Here are five reasons why you should choose Oracle cloud for your next hosted infrastructure project.

1. Optimised for Oracle workloads

Your Oracle applications can (in theory) run on any of the available cloud services platforms. But unless you choose Oracle cloud, it will never run optimally. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been designed from the ground up for Oracle customers, ensuring that hardware, OS and software work together in harmony for maximum performance.

With support for Oracle databases of up to 40 terabytes, you can recognise the full potential of cloud scalability. Using 51.2TB NVMe instances (the largest available from any provider), you can support millions of I/O operations per second for the most demanding applications. And Oracle Cloud Infrastructure clustering enables near-instantaneous fail-over for high availability operations.

2. A completely integrated technology stack

Oracle remains the only provider to offer a complete technology stack that includes IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Bare metal servers, operating systems and enterprise-class databases and applications work in sync to deliver a true Oracle experience.

By adopting what they call a “second-generation” approach to cloud services, Oracle cloud is faster and more predictable. And because your team is already familiar with the Oracle technology stack, you’ll find it easier to control your costs too.

3. Oracle technology for an Oracle future

“First-generation” cloud platforms are marked by the piecemeal way in which services are developed and integrated. Most began as a vanilla platform, only adding security functionality and migration tools as the need arose. This means that customers using first-generation services often need to re-engineer their systems as the underlying platform evolves.

Oracle’s second-generation design approach means that core-to-edge security, governance and performance have all been built-in from the start. Oracle customers have everything they need to build future-ready applications now – and avoid additional re-engineering overheads.

4. Security by design

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure addresses many of the challenges associated with multi-tenant platforms with core-to-edge protections including customer isolation, data security, internal-threat detection, and highly automated threat remediation. Your data is completely isolated from other Oracle customers to ensure you meet your regulatory and moral obligations to customers and employees.

External attacks are mitigated with layers of defence including built-in firewalls, DDoS and encryption to detect and block incoming threats. You also have the option to overlay adaptive and/or multi-factor authentication to protect trusted user credentials.

5. Simplified migration

Optimising your applications for the cloud may require significant redevelopment to avoid spiralling pay-as-you-use costs. But because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure uses an almost identical code base and technology to your existing on-premises systems, there is virtually no re-coding or re-engineering required at all.

This offers several benefits. First, your DevOps team are already familiar with the environment, helping to reduce and shorten the learning curve. Second, the time to deployment is reduced, allowing you to make the move to the cloud more quickly. Third, you can begin cloud-based operations more quickly, reducing time to ROI.

Saving time and money

For existing Oracle database customers, choosing Oracle cloud is a no-brainer. Reduced deployment costs, optimised application and database performance and a future-ready platform will help your business reach its strategic goals faster.

These are just 5 reasons to choose Oracle Cloud. In our next blog , we focus on five more reasons why if you are running Oracle – Oracle Cloud should be your platform of choice.