By Rex Wang, VP of product marketing, Oracle
Oracle’s approach to cloud computing is the same as the company overall strategy – delivering complete, integrated, standards-based and modern enterprise software and hardware solutions to simplify IT for our customers.
This enables customers to achieve the full promise of cloud computing while avoiding the common pitfalls of first generation cloud solutions which require complex integration and are often built on proprietary technologies which inhibit integration, portability and choice. This leads to fragmented data and processes, and higher complexity and cost – the very things cloud computing is supposed to avoid.
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| Rex Wang |
With Oracle, customers benefit from complete, integrated cloud solutions based on open standards. This development methodology is at the core to enabling a simplified and powerful cloud that makes integration and interoperability easy, prevents vendor lock-in, and provides a lower total cost of ownership.
Oracle’s roadmap
We see cloud quickly moving beyond the early adopter stage and into the mainstream. About a third of our customers are already using cloud computing in some way, and more are developing their own cloud adoption plans. While cost savings was the most common driver for cloud computing, today faster innovation and greater business agility is getting the attention of business and IT leaders.
Oracle’s cloud strategy and roadmap is to deliver the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud solutions in the industry to both cloud consumers and cloud providers. In terms of breadth and depth, Oracle offers an unmatched suite of integrated cloud applications and platform services, delivered via an all-Oracle “stack” that is optimized for performance, reliability, availability and security.
We are embedding advanced, modern functionality such as social, mobile and business intelligence into business processes such as sales, marketing, customer service, HR and finance. We also offer a complete portfolio of cloud products to enable IT departments and service providers to build and operate private or public clouds – including applications, middleware, database, operating systems and virtualization software, server, storage, networking and professional services.
Oracle provides the industry’s broadest and most complete portfolio of public, private and managed cloud offerings, which are including Oracle Cloud, Managed Cloud Services and Private Cloud Products.
Concern areas
A customer’s journey to cloud often starts with a first step of consolidation, typically at the infrastructure layer (IaaS) using virtualization technology to more efficiently share hardware. Probably 80-90% of our customers are already doing some form of consolidation today, but perhaps only 20-30% of their systems are consolidated, because consolidation can be a multi-year journey.
Virtualizing your infrastructure does save hardware, power and costs, but does nothing to reduce the cost and complexity of the heterogeneous software stacks running in those virtual machines. This is an area that is often overlooked. A very large percentage of cost is associated with the portion above the virtualization layer.
To address this, customers need to also consolidate at the platform layer (PaaS) by choosing a standard application platform and database platform for all, or most, applications. This reduces the heterogeneity and complexity, resulting in even greater cost savings and faster deployment of new applications. Heterogeneity is the real driver of cost and complexity, so reducing that gives the greatest benefit. Many of our customers are consolidating at both the IaaS and PaaS level, standardizing where possible at the PaaS level, and using IaaS where necessary.
There are a number of other common pitfalls and misconceptions associated with virtualization. For example, virtualization enables elastic scalability. In reality, to scale beyond a single physical server, you need clustering technology. Another example is virtualization provides high availability. In reality, virtualization enables rapid failover by moving the virtual machine to an alternate server, but does not provide continuous availability that can survive failures without interruption in service. Managing storage and networking are often overlooked when virtualizing servers. And finally, another common concern is virtualization sprawl, when there is excessive use of virtualization without adequate policies and oversight, resulting in out of control management costs.
Potential risks
Each organization has unique challenges and opportunities, and a unique portfolio of applications, and therefore how it best benefits from cloud computing will also be unique. For some customers, using public cloud service providers will be a great fit, but for others a private cloud or some combination of deployment models is the best approach. And this decision is not something a company makes once, but rather multiple times in order to adapt their cloud strategy as business and market trends evolve.
The most commonly cited risks are security and quality of service.
Regardless of how your applications are deployed and who is managing them, customer and company data must be safe, secure, and highly available. The service provider must not lose data nor allow unauthorized access, and of course the application needs to be available whenever needed. First generation clouds often outsource the management of their cloud applications to a third party and rely on multiple partners to complete their solution. Understanding who has access to your data and having the ability to quickly isolate a problem if something goes wrong can therefore be a big challenge.
Most public cloud service providers are specialists in one type of service, and they strive for economies of scale by providing a one-size-fits-all service. This strategy assumes, for instance, that the compliance and performance requirements for a large bank in Asia would be the same for a midsize manufacturing company based in U.S. This lumping together of customers can create a variety of security and operational risk challenges.
Organizations should carefully consider how much customizability, visibility and control is needed, now and in the future. To what degree will you customize your business applications? This level of control can vary substantially based on the type of cloud service and cloud provider. Proprietary clouds are expensive and difficult to change, extend or integrate, and may not be upgrade safe, meaning changes may have to be re-done after the vendor updates their shared application.
Lastly, a major risk consideration must be the feasibility, cost and complexity of changing your cloud service provider. Can you switch to another cloud? Can you move back on-premise if your business requirements or regulatory needs change?
Fusion
Nearly seven years ago, Oracle embarked on an effort to completely re-write and modernize all of our applications for the cloud, making sure they were all integrated and standards-based, and ensuring we included built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Thousands of people, billions of dollars, and key strategic acquisitions were required to transition Oracle from an on-premise application provider to a cloud application provider, as well as an on-premise application provider.
Today we have over 10,000 customers and more than 25 million users in the Oracle Cloud and we will continue to grow our cloud business by offering new cloud services and innovative features across our cloud stack.
