The cloud is the future of business transformation and innovation, and this is substantiated by the ever-increasing adoption of cloud technology across industries.
According to a 2022 survey, while 69% of organizations accelerated their migration to the cloud within 12 months, 60% of respondents acknowledged that cloud capabilities contributed to higher revenues.
The modern business landscape demands organizations transition to the cloud to keep pace with shifting market dynamics and consumer trends.
As the market for cloud migration expands, organizations using Oracle’s E-Business Suite (EBS) are strategically embracing this trend. C-suite executives see Oracle EBS Cloud Migration as a way to leverage cloud technology’s agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
Transitioning to the cloud offers unique opportunities for organizations to redesign their operational paradigms, fostering greater operational resilience and innovation. With cloud migration, organizations can implement robust security measures to strengthen data security and disaster recovery capabilities. Additionally, the cloud’s ubiquitous accessibility supports global operations and empowers remote workforces—the two key elements for modern enterprises.
Cloud migration for Oracle EBS is not just an infrastructure upgrade—it’s a catalyst for business growth and sustainability. It crafts a more resilient, agile, and cost-effective foundation than legacy on-premises setups, paving the way for future scalability and innovation.
This blog will explore the benefits, technical challenges, and inspiring success stories that define the journey of Oracle EBS migration to the cloud.
Cloud Migration: Why Organizations Choose to Transition to the Cloud
When it comes to cloud migration, the overarching objectives and advantages remain consistent across organizations: speed, scalability, and cost-cutting. By hosting applications and workloads in highly optimized IT environments, cloud solutions deliver the following benefits:
- Reduced costs
By choosing cloud services, organizations eliminate hefty upfront costs. Instead, they incur operating expenses, paying only for the computing resources and services consumed. Partnering with a trusted cloud service provider also extends the benefits of economies of scale to customers.
Client organizations need not spend money running data centers, maintaining hardware, upgrading software, and troubleshooting—the cloud vendor takes charge of all such operations. So, internal teams can focus on more strategic, revenue-generating areas. Moreover, service providers boast a much higher server utilization rate than traditional on-prem data centers. This leads to efficient resource usage, ensuring long-term sustainable growth.
- Increased agility and scalability
Transitioning to the cloud environment empowers organizations with the flexible capabilities needed to respond to new opportunities and challenges proactively. The agile and scalable nature of cloud solutions enables IT teams to rapidly set up new development projects in application development environments—they need not purchase, deploy and maintain costly hardware, databases, and containers. Client organizations can enjoy continuous access to the latest cloud capabilities without worrying about the technicalities of software upgrades.
Cloud infrastructure is highly scalable, so it can dynamically adjust computing resources according to demand fluctuations. Cloud service providers can smoothly scale resources/capabilities during demand spikes and even pull back computing capacity during seasonal drops. This flexibility helps optimize operational costs without compromising productivity.
- Improved data availability and accessibility
Cloud infrastructure is highly conducive to remote work. As an increasing number of organizations now support a global workforce, cloud solutions allow remote employees to access business-critical systems like accounting, HR, SCM, etc., from their web browsers. This directly translates to better accessibility, supporting professionals across geographies.
Cloud service providers employ robust redundancy and distribution strategies across multiple cloud facilities and separate zones within their data centers. This improves disaster recovery and business continuity, eliminating the need for additional investments in disaster recovery planning.
- Better workload performance
A single data center may be unable to handle global workloads, leading to significant latency and performance degradation. This is where cloud technology offers an advantage.
Public clouds often have multiple regional data centers across various locations worldwide. Thus, organizations can leverage public clouds to host workloads closer to the target user base. It ensures low latency and improved performance while complying with location-specific data sovereignty and compliance regulations.
Furthermore, organizations can leverage cloud infrastructure to reduce the strain on expensive local data centers. While they can continue to use their local data centers for critical workloads, they can host routine workloads in the cloud environment. By doing so, organizations need not invest substantial finances to construct or expand their local data center.
- Stronger data security
A trusted cloud service provider implements advanced security monitoring, patching, and research and development measures. Cloud services that employ strong encryption standards (for example, AES-256, TLS 1.2, or higher) can effectively protect sensitive data at rest and in transit.
Many cloud environments have built-in security capabilities that make it easier to implement identity and access management (IAM) controls, two-factor authentication, and other security protocols to ensure who can access what data and under what conditions. By conducting regular security audits, cloud service providers can proactively identify and mitigate potential security threats and vulnerabilities, ensuring that business data remains safe in the cloud.
The Roadblocks of Cloud Migration
Cloud migration represents a significant paradigm shift driven by cloud computing. The biggest appeal of cloud technology is its highly scalable and flexible (pay-as-you-go model) nature. Organizations can use the resources needed for as long as it makes sense for their business and pay only for the resources used.
As appealing and resource-efficient as this may sound, transitioning to the cloud comes with distinct technical challenges. The catch is that the cloud environment cannot optimally support all business workloads due to specific dependencies, performance requirements, or design characteristics. This is further complicated by data security and compliance regulations governing the domain. Thus, tech leaders and IT teams must carefully consider the intricate nuances of moving voluminous workfloads and hosting business-critical data in the cloud.
Generally, organizations migrating from Oracle EBS to the cloud face some common challenges, including –
- Skills Gap
Transitioning to a cloud environment involves deploying new technologies, processes, and third-party integrations. Despite the many advantages of cloud computing, technical complexities, and skill gaps can prevent organizations from gaining optimal value from Oracle EBS cloud migration.
If an organization’s current employees lack the necessary skills and qualifications to manage IT roles in the new infrastructure, they cannot ensure seamless alignment and interoperability between the existing infrastructure and the target cloud environment.
- Migration complexity
Cloud migration involves moving applications, workloads, and data from on-prem to a cloud environment. Teams usually complete this transition in phases, ensuring that one step is implemented successfully before moving on to the next phase. This is easier said than done. For example, one cannot simply move legacy software to the cloud as is – this may lead to extended downtime periods and loss of business-critical functionalities, hampering productivity and customer experience.
Organizations with diversified tech stacks often have difficulty implementing a linear Oracle cloud migration strategy. Complex IT architecture and processes make it challenging for IT teams to identify and document dependencies and follow a step-wise approach to moving individual components/systems to the cloud.
- Data security and compliance
Data integrity and security concerns primarily arise due to breaches during the migration process or inadequate access controls. Organizations must take necessary measures to implement robust encryption methods, data transfer protocols, and key management practices to protect sensitive information both in transit and at rest.
Since most organizations customize Oracle EBS and integrate it with other systems to serve specific business needs, data security concerns become amplified. Additionally, IT teams must understand the ramifications of location-specific data protection laws and compliance standards. For instance, if an organization lacks complete visibility of where its data and applications are hosted, it might contradict certain data privacy laws like the GDPR.
- Downtime & business disruption
Moving to the cloud can be resource-intensive and time-consuming for organizations with massive data volumes and complex business processes. Without a proper migration strategy in place, the transition may lead to extended periods of system unavailability, which can lead to significant losses.
Organizations must choose the right cloud environment (public, private, or hybrid model) that best suits their needs and is compatible with Oracle EBS. To ensure this, it’s crucial to identify and address potential challenges related to performance, scalability, and integration with existing on-prem systems. Anticipating migration bottlenecks and crafting remediation strategies is key to minimizing business disruption during the transition.
- Network Bandwidth
Defining the network bandwidth requirements of cloud applications or services is crucial for Oracle cloud migration. Moving to the cloud entails that the solution should exceed (or at least match) the performance of on-prem applications.
Organizations that do not define the bandwidth requirements at the get-go might face latency issues with the migrated applications, compromising UX. In such a scenario, cloud migration will fail to meet business objectives and deliver additional value to the organization.
Success Stories: Planning a Successful Oracle Cloud Migration Strategy
Organizations seeking Oracle EBS to cloud migration must meticulously plan the transition.
- The first step involves evaluating their existing data center needs (factoring in capacity growth, hardware refresh cycles, disaster recovery capabilities, and overall business responsiveness).
- The next step would be to evaluate various cloud service models and deployment options that align with organizational goals and requirements, comparing them against the existing on-prem infrastructure.
- IT teams must clearly define and understand the target application(s) or workloads suitable for Oracle cloud migration and choose the cloud target (public/private/hybrid/multi-cloud and IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) accordingly.
- It’s crucial to evaluate cloud migration costs to allocate adequate budget for initial migration and ongoing support. IT teams must define performance requirements and expectations for different workloads (post-migration) and establish KPIs for continuous performance monitoring and reporting.
- Once the migration requirements are in place, choosing a competent and reliable vendor with extensive industry experience, like Neev Systems, is best. Initiating the transition process in-house is costly and puts considerable pressure on internal resources who might not have the right skills for proper cloud implementation.
The experience and implementation expertise of cloud service providers help organizations make a well-planned migration strategy, accelerate time-to-market, realize greater cost savings, and enjoy the perks of managed support.
Here are two success stories wherein Neev Systems successfully helped real-world clients realize the optimal benefits of cloud implementation:
Case study 1
A California-based retail and personal styling company faced challenges with legacy systems as it scaled operations. Their team struggled to manage 15+ systems, which led to scaling issues and operational inefficiencies. We successfully implemented Oracle Cloud Financials and Procurement solutions to streamline and optimize financial processes and promote automation.
Case study 2
A US-based firelog brand leader faced communication and delivery challenges since it availed services from different vendors for each of its service lines. We helped eliminate this fragmented approach via our support services for Oracle Fusion Cloud, Middleware, and custom applications. Our Oracle integration strategy created streamlined, scalable, and reliable processes, replacing manual processes and controls with automated processes.
Our seasoned experts have extensive experience in Oracle solutions, including Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Cloud Applications, and Enterprise Performance Management) and Reporting platforms (EPM, Analytics, and BI). We also support Integration and Middleware technologies (Fusion Middleware and Database Administration).
