Best Practice Guide Cloud computing How to achieve the

Best Practice Guide

1 Oracle cloud IaaS for applications Version 2.0 © CINTRA 2019www.cintra.com

Your Oracle applications, delivered from the cloud:

How to achieve the benefits of cloud from your business-critical Oracle applicationsCloud computing

Do more with your dataBest Practice Guide

How to achieve the benefits of cloud from your business-critical Oracle applications

Cut costs, improve agility and free yourself from data center ties by migrating your critical Oracle applications to the cloud. We explain why this is now possible and how you can deliver the first benefits within weeks.

Contents

01 Foreword

02 Achieve the benefits of cloud with your critical Oracle applications

05 Eleven things every organization needs to know before migrating Oracle applications to the cloud

08 How to deliver a cloud pilot of your Oracle application in 30 days

12 Contact us

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How to achieve the benefits of cloud from your business-critical Oracle applicationsBest Practice Guide

Best Practice Guide




Cloud computing continues to mature, with organizations large and small across all sectors making use of cloud and enjoying transformational business value.

Foreword

David Speirs, Founder Catalyst Business Solutions and Gartner Executive Partner Associate

With over 30 years’ of delivering international IT programs for Seagram, Menzies Distribution, Price Waterhouse, Babcock and The Scotsman. Speirs provides strategic advice to public and private organizationa undergoing digital transformation programs.

The practical benefits and risks of cloud computing are becoming increasingly clearer. Cloud is becoming more mainstream as organizations move toward cloud services with production application and mission critical solutions.

There is clearly a notable increase in cloud strategy initiatives to align cloud adoption with defined business outcomes, taking into consideration innovation, agility and cost savings.

Organizations are achieving cloud computing benefits regardless of industry, size and geographic region. Understanding cloud service offerings, technologies and terminology is critical for organizations to establish viable strategies and to find success in their use of cloud service offerings.

Currently cloud services have tended to be used for new application development, with most businesses keeping their mission-critical and often highly customized applications on-premise. This is in part down to the complexity of migrating them to another platform, while retaining all the modifications that have been made to support their unique processes. However, the benefits of cloud can be achieved around these applications too, without losing

all those valuable customizations.

Cloud computing isn’t a product, it’s a cost-effective way to delivering technology services that support your business. Organizations must consider the following areas:

• Understand cloud trends and opportunities – there is no single approach to cloud

• Define the right cloud strategy that unleashes the benefits you require

• Understand the principles of how cloud services are consumed. Considering availability, performance, security, and the appropriate model that fits your type of organization

From an Oracle application perspective, this guide will help you to introduce the considerations, challenges, and benefits of Oracle cloud services, by specifically migrating your applications and creating a cloud foundation that delivers value to your business.

“There has never been a better time to get ahead of your competitors by starting your cloud journey”




Achieve the benefits of cloud with your critical Oracle applications

Organizations large and small rely on Oracle applications to ensure they can operate smoothly and efficiently. From E-Business Suite to PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, FlexCube, Primavera and beyond, these applications are essential to businesses and public sector bodies all around the world.

Business-critical Oracle applications are traditionally deployed in your co-location data center or in-house data room, using dedicated infrastructure that you need to buy, maintain and upgrade. Having to do all of this yourself is expensive, while the on-premise infrastructure model limits your flexibility, scalability and agility where these applications are concerned.

Many organizations are already migrating parts of their enterprise architecture to the cloud, including new capabilities and even some smaller line-of-business applications. These deployments typically use Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Given this trend, there’s a growing desire to extend the benefits of cloud to their more complex, mission-critical and enterprise-grade applications, in particular their Oracle ones.

However, because most organizations heavily customise their implementations of these apps to support their unique ways of working, switching to a cloud-based, one-size-fits-all software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution isn’t an option (though with the Oracle cloud, it could be in the future – we’ll touch on this below).

Cloud benefits from your existing applications

The good news is that there’s now a way to achieve the benefits of cloud, while keeping all the customizations you’ve made to your critical Oracle applications. The solution is to use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which enables you to move your existing applications to the cloud in their current state.

The benefits of moving your Oracle applications to the cloud

Moving your business-critical Oracle applications to the cloud will enable you to unleash the usual and well-understood benefits of this type of infrastructure, including:

• Scalability and flexibility: Near-infinite room to grow your application as your demands increase, or decrease capacity at quiet times

• Business agility: Quickly try out new capabilities, thanks to the speed at which you can add capacity to your application environments

• Cost-effectiveness: Only pay for (and license) what you use; much on-premise hardware is under-used, particularly in test and development environments, where utilization is sometimes less than 10%1. Cloud helps minimize this inefficiency

• Cost agility: Low up-front costs and the ability to start small and grow (or shrink), mean you don’t risk getting tied into long-term contracts or expensive infrastructure if they (or the project they’re underpinning) don’t meet your needs. You can now afford to try things out, measure success and quickly adapt accordingly

• Data center reductions: Migrating your Oracle applications to the cloud in the right way will enable you to reduce your data center footprint and cost

Why now is the time to consider migrating your essential Oracle applications to the cloud – complete with any customizations you’ve made

1 http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/application-development-cloud-1945542.pdf

Abdul Shiekh, CTO and President Cintra Corporation

With over 30 years of Oracle industry experience, including roles at the European Space Agency and Oracle Corporation, Abdul is the technical force behind Cintra’s successful delivery of optimized technology architectures that support the foundation its customers’ modernization strategies

Best Practice Guide




“Many organizations are looking for alternatives to the major capital expenditure of buying new hardware. In Oracle’s cloud, there’s now a viable option”


• Greater automation: All organizations are looking to use automation as a way of getting more work done with fewer resources. Cloud is a proven model to accelerate your automation capabilities

• Reduce the cost of infrastructure management: This could be cheaper in the cloud than on- premise

• Improve physical security: Cloud data centers are incredibly secure, typically more so than an on-premise data room

In addition to these benefits, which are common to all cloud providers, running your Oracle applications on the Oracle cloud unlocks further advantages:

• Technology flexibility: Oracle offers various flavours of Infrastructure as a Service, including bare metal provisioning, dedicated compute and regular compute. Moreover, unlike some cloud providers, Oracle gives you access to the underlying infrastructure in both a dedicated or multi-tenanted environment, even for Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility and enables you to implement appropriate foundations for your specific needs

• Performance: You’re able to choose an appropriate level of cloud performance for your application, from standard compute to high-end Exadata machines

• Ease of migration: There’s no need to significantly re-architect your Oracle application or its platform when you migrate it to the Oracle cloud. This is because Oracle’s cloud is specifically engineered to work with Oracle databases, middleware and applications. If you choose a different cloud provider for your Oracle application, there will likely be more major re- architecting involved

• Security: You can implement your own enterprise-grade security in the same way you do on- premise, thanks to the ability to access the underlying infrastructure

• Security: Oracle offers a ‘cloud-from-your-own-data-center’ option, the Oracle Cloud Machine (more on this in the following piece)

• Scalability: Oracle Cloud can scale vertically and horizontally to support large persistent data workloads

• Realistic test environments: Oracle cloud is a reliable platform for testing Oracle applications. Unlike most cloud providers, Oracle’s setup enables you to create test environments that closely resemble your on-premise ones, meaning you can run reliable tests. This reduces risk and accelerates production deployments

• Ease of management: Your Oracle Cloud estate can be managed using the same Oracle enterprise tooling that most organizations already use for their existing Oracle ecosystem

• Stepping stone to future Software as a Service (SaaS) model: Oracle enables you to extend and customize its SaaS applications using its PaaS cloud, meaning it’s possible to enjoy the benefits of SaaS while still ensuring the application works the way you need it to. By migrating your existing applications to the Oracle IaaS cloud, complete with those customizations, you’re taking your first step towards this type of ‘SaaS with PaaS’ model

Best Practice Guide




Why now is the time to migrate your Oracle applications to the cloud

As the data center equipment that underpins critical Oracle applications reaches the end of its life, many organizations are looking for alternatives to the major capital expenditure of buying new hardware. In Oracle’s cloud, there’s now a viable option.

Oracle’s cloud offering has matured significantly in the past few years and it now has a cloud data center footprint covering the whole globe. And while your overall enterprise cloud strategy should make use of a range of cloud providers, when it comes to your Oracle applications and databases, the Oracle cloud is almost always the best solution.

We’ve seen companies recently move their Oracle applications to the Oracle cloud and achieve significant cost savings and lower total cost of ownership. As a result, they’ve freed up budgets and have been able to innovate in other areas. Importantly, migrating to cloud helps free their technology teams from the constant need to maintain existing infrastructure. Instead, they’re able to offer the organization a more agile and innovative service that delivers greater business value.

And perhaps most crucially of all, cloud adoption in this area is still in its infancy, which means that embracing it now can give you a distinct competitive advantage.

With the benefits tantalizingly close and costs so low, it can seem tempting to rush out and start moving your Oracle applications to the cloud. But as with most things, a little planning will greatly enhance the likelihood of achieving the desired benefits – and achieving them quickly. In our next piece, we reveal 11 things every organization needs to know before they start migrating their critical enterprise Oracle applications to the cloud.


“Migrating to cloud helps frees technology teams from the constant need to maintain existing infrastructure. Instead, they’re able to offer the organization a more agile and innovative service that delivers greater business value”

Best Practice Guide




Eleven things every organization needs to know before migrating Oracle applications to the cloud

Oracle’s cloud is engineered to work with your Oracle applications, but it isn’t simply a case of shifting exactly what you’ve got on-premise to the cloud. Here are 11 things you need to consider as you plan your cloud migration

Organizations across all sectors are gradually moving their technology to the cloud, to enjoy all the benefits this can bring. But one area they haven’t been as quick to migrate is their critical Oracle enterprise applications, such as E-Business Suite or Primavera. This is largely because these applications get heavily customized to suit the organization’s unique ways of working. Shifting to a one-size-fits-all software as a service (SaaS) solution isn’t viable.

The alternative is to migrate the existing enterprise application – customizations and all – to suitable cloud infrastructure. There are several credible enterprise cloud providers, and smart organizations are adopting multi-vendor cloud strategies where they select the best cloud for specific purposes. For Oracle applications and databases, Oracle’s cloud is nearly always best in terms of performance, cost-effectiveness and ease of migration. This is because all parts of the Oracle technology stack – from the infrastructure up to the applications – come from the same vendor and are engineered to work together. We’ll therefore focus on the Oracle cloud for the remainder of this guide.

It’s so quick and low-cost to start spinning up cloud environments for your Oracle applications that it’s tempting to jump right in and see where it takes you. However, a little bit of preparation will greatly improve your likelihood of success. Here are 11 things to consider as you prepare to move your business-critical Oracle applications to the cloud.

1. Choose the right flavour of Oracle IaaS cloud

You’ve got several options when it comes to migrating your Oracle applications to the Oracle cloud, and it’s important you choose the right one if the application is to perform well.

For most workloads, the standard Oracle infrastructure as a service offering will suffice, though you need to select the appropriate version:

• Bare metal server: This provides access to a server, giving you ultimate flexibility, including the ability to use your own hypervisor

• Dedicated compute: This includes a server with a hypervisor and guest operating system. All of this will be for your sole use, and you get full access to the guest OS

• General compute: This includes a server with a hypervisor and guest operating system on shared infrastructure. Again, you get full access to the guest OS

If you need high performance, perhaps for tier-one database workloads, consider the cloud options that use Engineered Systems. There’s also the storage-only option, if you just want to use the cloud for application backups.

Lastly, if you’re concerned about security or must guarantee the geographical location of your data, there’s the Oracle Cloud Machine. This appliance sits in your own data center and is priced on a consumption (pay for what you use) basis, meaning you have dedicated infrastructure and all the flexibility of cloud inside your own firewall. This is a game-changer for many in highly regulated sectors, though you’ll still need to pay the data center charges.




2. Decide what to put in the cloud – and justify why you’re doing it

The Oracle cloud has matured significantly, meaning it’s now ready to support certain tier-one, mission-critical applications, as well as most tier-two and tier-three production workloads.

Your application’s test and development environments are also ideal candidates to move to the cloud, for the reasons we previously discussed. You can also safely use Oracle cloud for your critical Oracle applications’ disaster recovery and backup.

Virtualized environments are another area you should consider migrating.

As with any proposed change to long-established ways of working, your Oracle application cloud migration should be backed by a strong business case. Review your current Oracle estate and identify which apps will and won’t benefit from being in the cloud.

3. Think long-term

You won’t be able to move all your applications – or even all elements of a single application – to the cloud in one go, as this would be too risky and resource-intensive. Moving to the cloud should be done in phases, so you’ll need a hybrid cloud strategy for the short- and medium-term.

4. Don’t assume you can just ‘lift and shift’

Once you’ve decided which Oracle applications to migrate, don’t assume the best approach is to shift their on-premise architecture into the cloud; this may affect your ability to achieve the expected benefits. Instead, assess whether you can optimize the application’s environment for cloud by resizing or reconfiguring it.

5. What’s your application connected to?

Enterprise-scale applications are almost always connected to a wider ecosystem of databases, services and other applications. Before you move any application to the cloud, understand the impact the change will have on applications or processes that rely on it or its data.

Take these additional requirements into account when you design the cloud architecture for your application, and look at where you may need to reconfigure other applications and services to enable them to link seamlessly with the one you’re moving to the cloud.

6. Can you consolidate on premise?

When you migrate your application to the cloud, will you be able to reduce your on-premise or data center footprint? If you don’t or can’t, this is likely to end up increasing your overall infrastructure costs. Make sure you take this into account when selecting your application(s) and planning your cloud migrations.

7. How will you move the data?

Think about moving data between the cloud, your on-premise architecture and, of course, your users. Particularly where large volumes of information are involved, you’ll need to plan for how this data integration will be done in a way that delivers the performance you require. What steps can you take to reduce the amount of data that has to be moved between the cloud and on-premise, for example?

If you already run your Oracle applications from multiple data centers, your cloud data integration approach will be similar to what you already do.

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Best Practice Guide





8. What about security?

Security needs to be a central part of your plans from the word go. Involve your information security team to ensure you implement (and can document) appropriate measures. Make sure you can deploy your existing enterprise security tooling into the cloud environment, and apply the same level of rigour you would with on-premise implementations.

On a more granular level, make sure you’ve defined the security requirements per application and per dataset, ideally on a tiered basis. This will help you decide what data can reside in the cloud and what can’t.

9. Think about availability

In your data center or data room, you have complete control when it comes to scheduling maintenance windows. In the cloud, however, these will be determined by your provider, so if you need your application available at all times, you must architect its cloud environment to use multiple cloud data centers. This will enable you to failover to a different site during maintenance.

10. Licensing

In the Oracle world, the cost and complexity of licensing means it always requires close attention. Done correctly, though, migrating your applications to the cloud can help reduce your license requirement and enable you to run a leaner estate. This is because you can add and license new environments as you need them, rather than having to plan ahead to procure and license capacity that then sits unused until it’s required.

When migrating Oracle applications from on-premise to the Oracle IaaS cloud, you can transfer your existing licenses to cover the application and technology in the new environment – provided they’re no longer needed on-premise (see point 6). Moreover, if some on-premise licenses are no longer required to support a cloud-bound application, you may be able to reallocate or cancel them, to free up funds.

Lastly, remember that if you start to add more environments to your cloud architecture, these will all need to be licensed.

11. Plan the migration

Lastly, set out a plan for how you’ll migrate to the cloud, adopting an agile, ‘build fast’ approach. You can afford to do this because there isn’t the up-front capital expenditure associated with traditional technology migrations, and because the flexible nature of the cloud infrastructure reduces the need for medium- and long-term capacity planning.

It’s therefore perfectly feasible to take a portion of your overall project, put it in the cloud, assess how it performs, learn lessons and make changes to improve it. We’ll look at this in more detail in the next piece.

While there’s value in learning your own lessons, you can accelerate your overall cloud adoption and reduce risk by working with a partner that has done similar migrations before, enabling you to benefit from lessons learned elsewhere.

Conclusion

When you’re looking to move critical parts of your operations to the cloud, you need to minimize risk and maximize the likelihood of success. By planning carefully and keeping these 11 key things in mind throughout, you’ll put your organization in the strongest possible position to enjoy the benefits of cloud from your Oracle enterprise applications.

In our final piece, we’ll look at the process of migrating an Oracle application to the Oracle cloud, and demonstrate how you can deploy your first pilot in as little as 30 days.

“By planning carefully and keeping these 11 key things in mind throughout, you’ll put your organization in the strongest possible position to enjoy the benefits of cloud from your Oracle enterprise applications”

Best Practice Guide




How to deliver a cloud pilot of your Oracle application in 30 days

Benefit from the flexibility, agility and cost-effectiveness of cloud in your critical Oracle enterprise applications. We reveal how you can have your first pilot up and running in just six weeks

Migrating one of your Oracle applications – most likely a critical part of your business operations – to the cloud, may sound like a time-consuming undertaking. However, by following established processes built on best practices and lessons learned from similar migrations, you might be surprised at how quickly you can get your Oracle enterprise applications running in the cloud.

Delivering a full, waterfall-style migration project isn’t practical when you want the benefits of cloud within weeks, not years. Instead, you should look to use agile approaches, starting in one area and delivering in short, sharp bursts, learning lessons and applying them to the next iteration.

The first step should therefore be a pilot of one of your Oracle applications (or part thereof) in the cloud, and it’s possible to deliver this in as little as 30 days. In this time, you’ll go through a complete end-to-end migration process that becomes a framework for future iterations. Here’s how it can work.



Best Practice Guide




Discover • Application survey• Stakeholder interview• Architecture scorecard

Define • Project selection criteria• Candidate project selection • Feasibility evaluation

Design • Features & capabilities • Solution architecture • Implementation plan

Deploy • Technical implementation • Operational configuration • Solution validation

How to deliver a cloud pilot of your Oracle application in 30 days

Your 30-day cloud journey

Discover

Start by surveying your Oracle application estate and engaging with relevant stakeholders. Produce a high-level Architecture Scorecard for your Oracle applications, looking at performance, security, agility, cloud-readiness and other key measures.

Define

Based on the outputs of the Discover phase, identify an application where you could achieve tangible benefits from running it in the cloud, and where migration complexity is low. Evaluate the feasibility of moving this to the cloud, looking at its usage patterns, security and compliance requirements, dependencies and the like.

Design

Based on your understanding of the application’s requirements, design the features and capabilities you need from the cloud infrastructure. Create an appropriate solution architecture – preferably following a proven blueprint – and set out the implementation plan.

Deploy

Once your plans are in place, you’re ready to provision the cloud infrastructure, set it up the way your application requires, copy the required data to the cloud environment and configure the application for its new cloud home. This should be followed by a period of validation, to test performance and other factors.

Best Practice Guide




“By following established processes built on best practices and lessons learned from similar migrations, you will be surprised at how quickly you can get your Oracle enterprise applications running in the cloud”

Following the 30-day pilot

Once your first Oracle application in the cloud pilot is running, you’ll start to be able to demonstrate the benefits of delivering it in this way. Assess all areas of its operation and make any required refinements to the infrastructure and application configurations to improve matters.

Once you have a solution you’re happy with, prepare it for production use. Oracle’s cloud offers a ready-made production-hardening toolset that integrates with enterprise tooling, making it easier and faster to get your pilot production-ready than it would be with most other cloud platforms.

Build out your cloud strategy and plans

In parallel with this, take the lessons learned and start to plan the next steps of your Oracle application cloud migration. Having gone through the full process and seen some of the challenges, start to build your critical Oracle applications into your wider hybrid cloud strategy and roadmap.

Set out which Oracle applications will move to the cloud and when, starting with those where the benefits are high and tangible, the migration complexity is manageable and risks are low. These applications should be followed by those where benefits are high but complexity is slightly greater. Repeat this risk vs reward analysis to prioritise each Oracle application you wish to move to the cloud. Remember: you may not want to migrate all your Oracle applications: if there’s no business case to do so, leave them where they are until such time as you can justify it.

Keeping your cloud performing

Just as it is with your on-premise Oracle application technology, you need to keep your cloud estate lean and well-maintained. This will ensure you continue to enjoy the benefits, particularly around cost-effectiveness. Stick to the cloud strategy you’ve set out to help prevent sprawl and unnecessary operational expenditure on resources that aren’t being used.

Do all of this, and you’ll be on the path to success, delivering genuine agility, flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness around the Oracle applications that are critical to your organization’s operations.

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Your pathway to successCintra is a multi-award winning Global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Cintra focuses on enterprises undergoing digital transformation strategies in Retail, Financial Services, Gaming and other verticals; becoming a trusted partner for organizations investing in Oracle Business Technology – delivering value by helping architect the digital enterprise.

www.cintra.com

Architecting you success




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Best Practice Guide Cloud computing How to achieve the