In August 2021, we released the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Cloud Adoption Framework to better support customers in their cloud adoption journey. The framework was created as a resource for anyone who wants to further their cloud knowledge—from a tech operator to a CIO—and as an opportunity to learn more about OCI’s unique capabilities.

OCI is a deep and broad platform of public cloud services. It enables you to build and run a wide range of applications in a scalable, secure, highly available, and high-performance environment. For customers with on-premises requirements, OCI is available in various deployment models, including the new Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. This new offering brings Oracle’s complete portfolio of public cloud infrastructure, fully managed cloud services, and Oracle Fusion software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications into your data center. OCI also offers a comprehensive set of multicloud solutions in the form of specialized deployments, database services, extensive monitoring capabilities, and strategic partnerships to fit any organization’s needs.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve made key updates to the Cloud Adoption Framework to better guide you in your cloud adoption process and better explain the inherent efficiencies of the OCI platform.

Before we dive into these changes, let’s revisit the basics of the framework.

What is the Cloud Adoption Framework?

The OCI Cloud Adoption Framework is a collection of cloud resources, best practices, tutorials, technical guidance, and enablement tools that are designed to guide your organization as it defines, refines, and deploys its cloud strategy.

The framework is a resource for any customer who wants to better understand the cloud adoption process. It provides a methodology and resources to facilitate the transition to the cloud. The framework also includes the tools needed to understand OCI’s differentiators and built-in efficiencies, such as Cloud Lift services, and key value programs, including the recently launched Oracle Support Rewards.

What’s new?

We’ve made the following key updates to the Cloud Adoption Framework.

New technical site

We enhanced how we deliver the framework by creating the OCI Cloud Adoption Framework technical site, which makes these assets more readily available to you.

The technical site hosts relevant technical content, assets, and tools to better enable your organization as it shifts to the cloud. The site includes templates for cloud business strategy documents, landing zone scripts to accelerate cloud deployments, and reference architectures for specific scenarios.

Other strategic areas

Another improvement we made to the Cloud Adoption Framework is the introduction of the following six strategic areas. These areas guide you in identifying specific organizational capabilities to support successful cloud transformations, visualizing the full journey to the cloud, and identifying the steps to ensure a successful cloud adoption.

  • Business strategy: Building and defining a business strategy relative to the cloud helps your organization document and communicate its business goals and cloud adoption journey. During this phase, an organization builds a business case to support human, financial, and technology investments, and ensures that it’s prepared for evolving from the on-premises IT procurement processes.

  • People strategy: This area helps your organization formalize a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to sponsor and guide the cloud adoption initiative. This CCoE, an extended virtual team with business and technical stakeholders, leads the organizational change management and defines roles, responsibilities, and skill build plans for business and technical users.

  • Security: This area helps your organization define the foundational aspects of security needed to minimize risks in the cloud adoption process. It helps to define a secure cloud architecture, identify and implement the right controls, and monitor and avoid configuration drifts.

  • Process design: This area helps your organization define the enterprise architecture, governance, and risk and compliance guidelines it needs to follow. During this phase, if needed, the organization defines a multiple-vendor cloud approach, a hybrid environment (on-premises and cloud) approach, or both.

  • Technology implementation: This area helps your organization transform the rules and processes defined in the process design area into a personalized and secured landing zone (cloud environment) that fulfills the organization’s needs. It then helps the organization migrate on-premises data center solutions, or create ones, for the specified business needs defined in the business strategy area.

  • Management and operations: Operating and managing a cloud environment is fundamentally different than managing on-premises environments. This area helps technology teams keep the environment running smoothly, optimized, and ready to grow as business demands require.

Cloud adoption empowers organizations to improve business agility and promote solution innovation by using the latest technologies. With new capabilities coming to market every day, cloud technology is continuously improving, providing the building blocks for companies to pioneer ground-breaking innovation.

So, the question is no longer whether your organization should move to the cloud, but how your organization can use cloud services to best suit its needs. With this iteration of the OCI Cloud Adoption Framework, you can introduce a proper people, process, and technology structure aligned with each phase of adoption.

What’s next?

Today, OCI customers, including independent software vendors (ISVs), are growing new lines of business, improving user experiences, accelerating operations, and reducing risks and costs. OCI offers secure, scalable, and reliable cloud services to host any ISV or enterprise application.

With OCI, customers can successfully deliver 24/7 operations and geographically diverse deployments, support dynamic customer traffic patterns including elastic scaling, and deliver highly secure infrastructure and platform services. OCI’s unique migration, provisioning, management tools, and Cloud Lift services, facilitate rapid deployment, while maintaining key customizations and integrations.

Oracle enables thousands of customers across industries on their journey to the cloud. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations are using a broad portfolio of services provided by OCI. If you’re thinking about moving your business to OCI, you can begin with the Cloud Adoption Framework, which is designed to meet your organization wherever it stands on its cloud journey.

Some changes that you can expect in the future include an interactive self-assessment tool to help you navigate the Cloud Adoption Framework and a landing zone script built into the Oracle Cloud Console to help automate the creation process.

Whether you’re already running workloads in the cloud or considering a multicloud strategy to use the best capabilities from any cloud provider, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Adoption Framework can help. Because it’s considered a living framework, we regularly review it to ensure that our technical resources are up to date, well positioned, and readily available to customers.

Review the updates in the OCI Cloud Adoption Framework website, and see the technical site for more information about the new six strategic areas. If you have questions or feedback, contact us. We look forward to supporting you in your digital transformation journey.