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This blog, which is the second part of a two-part series, will help you assess your readiness to exit your data center and manage your data more efficiently in the cloud. In “Barriers to a Data Center Exit” blog, we presented the challenges with on-premises data centers within the context of disruptive innovation that companies find themselves in and discussed the barriers to a data center exit. In this blog, we present the benefits of exiting expensive data centers and moving to the cloud. Download the full blog.
Benefits of exiting data centers
The cloud delivers all the benefits of on-premises data centers without the drawbacks. Companies across all industries that want to cut costs, improve profits, accelerate time to market, and drive innovation are moving to the cloud because its inherent elasticity delivers the desired speed, performance, and cost optimization. OCI offers many benefits, including scalability, high availability, security, reduced cost, compliance, and more.
Scalability
Companies can economically meet demand fluctuations on OCI because of its scaling capabilities, such as its ability to autoscale compute instances to add additional instances in parallel. Traditional workloads, such as database-centric workloads, weren’t built with scaling awareness, which limits their effectiveness in a cloud environment. OCI scales traditional workloads in multiple ways. Traditional, server-based workloads can be tuned with an exact amount of processor performance (cores) and memory. While the processors and memory can’t be dynamically adjusted as the application runs, they can be adjusted during a reboot.
OCI also offers automatic scaling of the database tier and block storage. There are several deployment options for database workloads that allow you to automatically scale database performance while it’s in use. OCI offers autoscaling options for block storage so applications that require attached disk storage can benefit from performance adjustments (in IOPS) while in use. Altogether, these capabilities enable OCI to scale performance, even for traditional workloads, and allow companies to dynamically respond to demand.
Cost optimization
While the cloud presents a significant opportunity for cost reduction, overspending on cloud services is a common concern. Reducing costs in the cloud is the first step toward profitability, which is becoming more important to investors than just absolute growth. OCI is designed to help customers manage their cloud spend with included services that provide budget guidelines and recommendations regarding underutilized services. Oracle also charges considerably less for core compute, storage, and networking than other hyperscalers, so even when their workload needs grow, companies can keep their IT spending reasonable and within budget. Oracle is the only hyperscaler which charges the same consistent low pricing in any region, anywhere across the globe; and, when compared to other hyperscalers, is generally 50% less expensive for compute, 70% less expensive for block storage, and 80% less expensive for networking/egress. Check out Oracle’s Cloud Economics website to learn more.
Agility and innovation
Moving your on-premises workloads to the cloud can help boost agility and innovation, which, in turn, can help you respond quickly to market conditions to protect and increase your market share. OCI helps you enhance your agility by letting you keep your existing architecture when moving to the cloud. This can reduce risk, complexity, and migration time. The sooner you can move your workload to OCI, the sooner you can experience the benefits of simpler administration, increased performance, and the ability to better meet fluctuating demand. For example, VMware workloads, which a lot of companies are deeply invested in, can typically be moved as-is to OCI. This means companies can continue to use their existing administrative tools and procedures to manage their VMware-based workloads. The ability to rapidly migrate workloads to OCI allows your team to focus more on adding valuable capabilities to meet market needs and less on the mundane task of maintaining infrastructure.
Compliance
If compliance is already a significant expense, moving to the cloud is unlikely to reduce it; in fact, it will probably increase because the cloud adds a third party to the environment. Most cloud providers provide compliance certifications and attestations required by customers using public cloud regions. However, customer needs are evolving. A governmental agency may require separate facilities to avoid the leakage of sensitive data. A supranational entity may require data residency within its member states. Customers currently using on-premises options from cloud providers probably expect the same compliance as in their public regions. With 80+ compliance certifications, across standards and regulations such as SOC, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST, FedRAMP, HITRUST, and more, Oracle Cloud enables customers to address the regulatory policy within their selected geography. Oracle Cloud also has broad and deep experience in global regulatory environments, including multiple existing contracts which public and private organizations can use as an easier way to migrate to OCI while meeting local regulations.
OCI offers cloud services exactly where customers need them—whether its government regions in US, UK, and Australia, sovereign regions for the EU or on-premises options such as Dedicated Region, Exadata Cloud@Customer, Compute Cloud@Customer, and Oracle Alloy. We believe that these unique offerings are the reason why Oracle is highly rated for its strategic cloud capabilities.
Cost optimization, estate modernization, innovation, and an improved overall experience are some of the compelling reasons to exit your data center and move your databases and applications to the cloud.
OCI Oracle Database offerings
OCI Oracle Database offerings form a comprehensive data platform that serves the unique data processing needs of all kinds of organizations. Small and midsize businesses looking to optimize costs and deploy mission-critical applications such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft or Oracle E-Business Suite leveraging Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard technology can consider Oracle Base Database Service, which offers database features based on specific needs.
If you need to consolidate workloads, for instance after a merger or acquisition, or are modernizing your workloads to simplify IT management, centralize your data management platform, or achieve another business or technical goal, then you may benefit from Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure. Companies running workloads on commodity hardware on-premises tend to see a 20% to 30% increase in efficiency out of the box once they move to Exadata.
If you need to consolidate workloads and do not have enough workloads to justify running on Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure (a quarter rack being the minimum requirement), you may consider Oracle’s latest offering, Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure. This service offers a configurable Exadata database virtual machine with a choice of size and shape. You’ll be able to deploy Oracle Database 23ai, which is a converged database. Oracle Database 23ai can handle any data type your application can generate and offers AI capabilities so you can build the most modern application, future-proofing your data platform. You can choose to upgrade your existing workloads to Oracle’s long-term database release version or build new ones on Oracle Database, leveraging features such as Oracle AI Vector Search, Oracle JSON Relational Duality, and many others and using low-code development tools such as Oracle APEX to build productivity applications.
If you want to grow your business and shift your team’s focus from mundane database activities, such as patching, backups, and monitoring, to more value-added work, you can consider Oracle Autonomous Database. It leverages Oracle Exadata, cloud capabilities, and AI/ML to allow databases to detect potential failures and preemptively fix them. This results in soft money savings, as staff can focus on building intellectual property to accomplish business requirements faster and better, and it helps companies unlock new opportunities.
Autonomous Database comes in multiple flavors. Companies needing extreme isolation or with stringent requirements around patching cycles can choose Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure; for others, Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless can be a great fit. Both database offerings provide the benefits of elastic pools for consolidation and autoscaling to scale CPUs based on utilization. Companies can leverage either Autonomous Database or Oracle Exadata on the same infrastructure to either move and improve their applications or simply lift and shift to gain a cloud advantage. Learn how to maximize your Oracle license investment with BYOL for Autonomous Database.
With Oracle Database, your company can achieve the ideal balance of price and performance while building a scalable, modern application. This approach allows you to maintain the flexibility and agility of your engineering teams and leverage their existing skills to modernize your data platform in the cloud of your choice. By selecting the right cloud, you can better optimize your costs, helping you drive both top-line growth and bottom-line savings.
Start your journey to the cloud with Oracle
The challenges of on-premises data centers and the opportunities to accelerate growth in the cloud are prompting more companies to make the move.
This blog provided some perspectives on the barriers to a data center exit and presented some benefits of exiting data centers and moving workloads to the cloud. It also showcased OCI Oracle Database offerings as a comprehensive and omnipresent data platform that serves your unique data processing needs. But seeing is believing, so please contact us for more information and sign up for a pilot-to-production workshop to tailor your solution to meet your business needs and accelerate your move to the cloud. Download the full blog.
Oracle Cloud Free Tier offers a great way to test this process out for yourself with a 30-day free trial of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which includes our Always Free Services.