By Jae Sook Evans, chief information officer, Oracle
It's been about 20 months since I left Walmart to become Oracle's chief information officer. Being CIO of a tech company like Oracle, I get the opportunity to incorporate many of our products and other IT services for our use, supporting upwards of 136,000 employees across many lines of business.
In addition to helping vastly improve our productivity with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we are also learning about and improving the cloud infrastructure we offer our customers.
You don't have to take my word for the progress OCI has made. The recent Gartner Solution Scorecard for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IaaS+PaaS analyzes cloud infrastructure and recognizes our momentum.
Our competitive advantage is partly rooted in our extensive experience running the most complex enterprise workloads, in addition to customer reliability on our core database services. But there's more: We've taken an unparalleled approach to security, allowing us to offer comprehensive SLAs for availability and performance — all at really aggressive price points. Plus, we can offer these features either through our public cloud or dedicated regions. Oracle also makes it easy for customers to pursue a multi-cloud strategy.
For example, many customers use the Microsoft Azure-OCI Interconnect to get the best of Oracle Cloud and Azure as a single experience and help them run even more workloads in the cloud.
In addition to helping improve OCI, I am responsible for selecting, building, and operating our Oracle Cloud region data centers. We already have 30 regions worldwide, one of the fastest expansions by any major cloud provider, with plans to expand to 42 cloud regions across commercial, government, and dedicated regions.
Migrations take work, but you can start right now
We've been in the same boat as many of our customers, in that we've often run applications several versions behind the most recent release, or worst yet, been confronted with hardware and software that will soon no longer be supported. We've experienced infrastructure sprawl and immature lifecycle management capabilities that greatly increased business risk. Moving to OCI was our solution to this problem, and it's why I bring it up.
One thing holding many companies back from moving heavy enterprise workloads to the cloud is that the thought of rebuilding an entire applications stack for the cloud can be a daunting prospect. What most people don't realize is that Oracle makes it easy to move those existing workloads to OCI — retaining critical aspects like database high availability — without having to refactor them.
We took an approach of "lifting and improving" many of our more difficult workloads. Our focus was on migrating our critical corporate services to improve security, availability, operational standards, and to improve the speed of deployment of modern services. We realized that we didn't have to adopt every cloud feature from the start.
In all these migrations, we didn't just move things 1:1 from on-premises. We right-sized our designs by reviewing average and peak utilization rates before we even migrated. After migration, we used automated tools such as the Cloud Advisor, which allowed us to calculate the right amount of computing, storage, and networking resources needed for a given workload.
Using this approach, we achieved a 50% reduction in our capacity needs, and greater utilization rates across our compute. For customers, this means you truly pay for what you use while also eliminating underutilized capacity. Plus, our Flexible Compute tool allows us to scale up and down through automation to meet any application demands, even during usage spikes.
One good example of this is our Java Download service, used by Oracle customers around the world to download Java releases. The service can often be marked by large increases in concurrent users on short notice. When we operated this service on-premises, we were forced to build an environment large enough to manage the inconsistent usage, but at a cost that was detrimental to extra resiliency or regular upgrades.
OCI allows us to change all that, as we can build across multiple regions and load-balance globally. This has led to a performance gain of more than a 75% within a 30% smaller footprint. In addition, we've seen our deployment times go from weeks or even months down to literally minutes.
And all these features and advantages come without sacrificing costs to our customers. And it hasn't been lost on the likes of Matthew Prince, CEO of cloud security provider Cloudflare — who we recently joined forces with — that leading cloud providers not named Oracle charge customers "egregious" sums (his word, not mine) whenever data leaves the friendly confines of their cloud.
Public cloud, private cloud – it's all the same
Oracle also recognizes that due to compliance and other requirements, some customers need to keep running some applications on-site. That's the rationale behind Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, which lets customers run OCI cloud services on-premises, without any intersection with the public cloud.
What's important with this service is that it provides more than just a subset of our services. These dedicated regions provide all the same services that we provide in our commercial regions and can help businesses with strict data sovereignty or privacy requirements.
This is something that I am excited to be part of providing and have already helped many customers with this solution.
Security in depth and by design
In addition, Oracle has engineered this second-generation cloud to make it as secure as possible — and, we believe, more secure than any other public cloud available. We have automated server configuration and patching, and have turned on security features by default to help ensure that ports and other connection points have been configured correctly on the customer side.
A recent presentation by Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, highlighted a zero-trust model and the importance of security by design. We are all aware of the risks of an unpatched system or an environment left unmonitored, but relying on human beings to keep up with every single administrative action covering thousands of servers will inevitably result in failures. So, we turned to automated methods to validate our actions and alert us of potential risks.
What I know now
In talking to my peers at other companies and having been an IT leader at various other enterprise-size companies, I realize that we share many similar challenges managing our legacy environments. One of the unique aspects of OCI is that it allows businesses to reap the benefits of being in the cloud regardless of how far along they are in their modernization journeys.
Today, we are seeing the cost and performance gains of lift and shift — or what I call "lift and improve" — without having to fully refactor every application, and we can take further advantage of native services on OCI such as our autonomous database. So not only are we able to manage our technical debt and make tremendous strides in our internal capabilities, but we are passing the fruit of our lessons along to our customers.
Learn more about how Oracle can help your business with cloud migration.
This post was created by Oracle with Insider Studios.
