In a recently released white paper “Ensuring That Your Enterprise is Cloud-Ready,” Oracle’s experts offer advice on developing a transition plan to support on-premise applications and workloads today while setting the stage for an easy migration to the cloud.

What to Wish & What to Watch

IT departments with established data centers want the benefits—the agility, flexibility, and lower cost—of the public cloud. The look-before-you-leap concerns, though, include regulatory compliance issues, security, data sovereignty requirements, need for low latency and use of custom legacy applications that won’t run on public cloud platforms. The trick, then, is to create an IT architecture that works in both capacities—on-premise and in-cloud environments—and sets the stage for growth to a public cloud. In the white paper, Oracle offers a good look at the characteristics of cloudy-ready IT architecture and the preparations it requires.

The Blueprint for Cloud-Ready IT Architecture

Ultimately, to be cloud-ready, IT departments need to create a consistent technology stack that works with traditional on-premise IT, private cloud and the public cloud. The technology in that stack includes hardware, operating systems, databases and applications.

The Building Plan

1. Streamline and modernize IT infrastructure

• Oracle notes that not all IT departments need this step but it’s important for the ones without immediate plans for a big transition to the cloud. They’ll want to streamline with modern systems that are cloud compatible. Oracle engineered systems can be key to this, delivering dramatic improvements in performance, availability, security and efficiency while lowering operating costs.

2. Accelerate time to value with appliances

• Oracle appliances are preconfigured to support databases, private cloud environments, UNIX or big-data applications. They are quick to deploy and operate. The white paper has specific information to achieve this.

3. Optimize and extend private cloud

• It’s tempting for IT departments to establish private clouds. They’re looking for lower costs and agility. Generic, private clouds, though, are not a good short-term or long-term solution. They simply are inappropriate for demanding and/or business-critical databases and applications. Low cost but insufficient is clearly not the answer. Oracle offers a solution with the Private Cloud Appliance with cost-optimized plans for private clouds to facilitate business-critical databases and make transition to public cloud easy.

4. Optimize and secure critical applications

• Experts in IT departments know that infrastructures cobbled together over time simply don’t deliver the required performance or security. The Oracle white paper outlines the specific concerns and offers the solution to employ high-end SPARC-based servers to optimize performance, efficiency and security on-premise or in the cloud.

5. Consolidate and protect data with advanced storage solutions

• IT departments want to consolidate existing storage while ensuring data security and improving performance. They work to accomplish this even as data volumes are growing. Oracle has modern storage solutions engineered to manage existing storage securely and dramatically improve security.

In the white paper, Oracle gives succinct descriptions of their cloud-ready systems that have precise equivalents to Oracle’s own public cloud. Using these systems will make the transition easy—whether you’ve decided to make the move relatively soon or much later—and you’ll be appreciating the benefits immediately with your on-premise infrastructure. Want to learn more? Check out the Oracle white paper “Ensuring That Your Enterprise is Cloud-Ready.”