Executive Overview
For a number of years, the industry has been talking about shifting to the cloud, and how everything is going to go cloud – from email to web hosting to any application currently running in your data centre today. Perhaps this came about on the back of the term software-defined data centre – where services that consume IT resources could be delivered at the click of a button – Presto!, a new web server, SQL database or even compute to accommodate the boom of virtualization and increase in workloads – this phenomenon has transformed from buzz word to reality in which IDC refers to it as an imminent shift ‘from exploration to optimization’.
Whilst, this all may seem utopian and straightforward, this is not without risk, unforeseen obstacles and implications that could prove detrimental to the company looking to undertake it? Companies have listened to the industry for many years now, but the large majority (at least in my experience) have not taken the plunge to go to the cloud even though there is research to strongly suggest this is where the technology world is going! Dave Bartoletti, the principal analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester believes that by 2018, 50% of large enterprises to have a production workflow running in the cloud. With this imminent shift in mind, companies are scrambling to adapt and change but find themselves asking the one vital question:
How do we move business-critical enterprise applications to the cloud without upsetting or impacting key applications and our users?
The Oracle Cloud Platform and IaaS Strategy
We recognise there is a risk in any major IT transformation (think back to when companies started to virtualise their most critical applications and putting them all on one or two servers), risk and is the underpinning theme of the question above, and regardless of where your own cloud journey begins, our converged Infrastructure portfolio provides insurance and a partnership, so customers can adopt an enterprise-ready cloud strategy with confidence.
How we do this is to build our own cloud infrastructure to emulate a software defined, virtualized data centre where customers can experience the same operational control, isolation, security and performance that they come to expect from their own, on-premises data centres by using the same hardware. To really understand the true value of this statement and what it means from an end to end cloud stack perspective, let’s take a competitive view on the cloud landscape, private, public and hybrid models:
The Oracle cloud strategy is simple, we see many different paths to the cloud, and our mission is to help streamline our customers. We are helping enterprise customers cutting the complexity of their existing infrastructure with an integrated architecture. If we look at the above cloud ecosystem, which shows that we have solutions in every facet where our engineered systems are architected, tested, and optimised to work together, spanning on-premises and cloud environments. As a result, they offer the flexibility to move seamlessly between both. Bottom line is that only Oracle can offer a public and private cloud in a single architecture.
If your business demands enterprise cloud strategies, one that spans on-premises and in the public cloud, then you should read on about our five journeys and why our IaaS meets the needs for these new demands. The right journey will depend on your starting point and current IT portfolio and should not necessarily be seen as sequential.
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To break these down and give a bit more context on what each journey aims to provide, this will be part of a multi-post blog, starting with streamlining on-premises applications.
Journey One – Streamlining your existing on-premises enterprise application infrastructure
The first step is really about cleaning up your existing environment, and preparing the most precious enterprise applications (namely databases, middleware, big data and analytics software) to utilise cloud-optimised infrastructure (this may come across as just another marketing term but I can assure you in the context of this discussion, it is the best way to describe it).
This on-premises approach optimises the infrastructure for these applications. Applications sit at the core of any IT business, services do not exist without a smart piece of middleware, database, or similar to deliver it to the user’s device. So what happens when these applications are spread across different infrastructure from different vendors, each with their own web of complexity on how they tie into each other. Let me give you an example of a conversation I overheard recently from a customer here in Australia uncovered an opportunity to streamline the on-premises applications.
Customer A (need to protect the innocent here) was looking to move some of their middleware platform to a public cloud provider but had a growing concern on how (and if) the version of legacy Java in their environment would run, they had no idea on what web applications and other services relied on it. These other applications were spread over many different devices, appliances, and hosts resulting in a lack of true integration and thus limit portability.
The perceived risk is too high to chance to just go big bang to the cloud as the applications were not in an integrated state to even consider migrating to the cloud, so a project to determine and simplify what infrastructure this part of the IT business sits on what part of their own journey to streamline their enterprise applications.
According to Gartner, who states that “90 percent of organisations will lack a postmodern application integration strategy and execution ability, resulting in integration disorder, greater complexity and cost”, so this particular customer mentioned above is not (or will not be) the only one in this situation.
So let’s dive a bit deeper and discuss (hypothetically) what we would look at when streamlining the applications.
Ultimately the end goal here is to make your on-premises applications ready for the cloud (our very own Chuck Hollis calls this “cloudification“) – and that may mean a host of variables that need to be looked at such as:
- Infrastructure compatibility
- Identifying any gaps between your current traditional architecture and next-generation cloud architecture
- Security (Can’t stress this one enough)
- Application portability
- In-flight upgrades or migrations that have dependencies
- Application services that are tagged for consolidation onto a single platform architecture that will enable that direct transition to the public cloud.
Getting a good picture of how suitable and “tidy” your current environment looks like is what it is all about and will have a drastic influence on the success of your overall cloud journey – whichever model it may look like.
The next blog post in this series will discuss our vision for your journey to the cloud by looking at how building a private cloud and its role as part of your overall cloud journey.
Stay tuned!