All roads from PeopleSoft lead to Cloud. Which one should you take?

November 9, 2022

Explore proven strategies, outcomes, and solution options by Astute Business Solutions and Oracle to make a smooth transition to the next generation ERP Cloud.

Moving to the Cloud is an important discussion to have regarding your unique business situation. While Cloud is a very broad term and can mean different things to different people, this post uses the term to describe Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Strategy & Cloud

Oracle has been evolving in the Cloud space and investing in the Cloud since 2016–2017. We rebuilt our business for the Cloud by building modern SaaS versions of all our major business applications and creating a brand new Cloud infrastructure platform with 100+ unique services.

We’re using the power of the Cloud to bring forth business agility for our end users.

Oracle has spent about $56 billion in research and development over the last 10 years. Much of this has gone into Cloud solutions. Some of this investment has helped pave the way for customers to adopt a seamless move to the Cloud. We’ve built a lift-and-shift model, including validation for migration, which empowers you to migrate more easily.

Innovation and transformation has led to Oracle becoming the single vendor that you can trust for the database and the application. In the future, as you look to take advantage of SaaS, Oracle can do that for you, too.

Global Footprint

The majority of investment in R&D went toward building out the Cloud regions. There are now 39 regions across the globe, many of which are in the U.S. There are also commercial and government Clouds, and the Interconnect Cloud with Azure.

Why Customers Choose OCI

The following are reasons customers are choosing OCI:

• Ease of migrating critical enterprise applications
• Includes all the services developers need to build Cloud native applications
• Autonomous services make it far easier to manage security, performance, and scalability
• Offers the most complete support for hybrid Cloud strategies
• Security is built-in, on by default, at no extra charge
• Superior price-performance

At Oracle, we believe in the power of AND. What we mean by this is that you don’t have to choose. We’re not pushing you to either stay On-Prem or move to the Cloud. You can leverage both to best fit your business:

• We solve On-Prem and Cloud challenges with software, hardware, and Cloud services for your unique needs.
• We run Cloud native and optimized traditional apps with a Cloud infrastructure that doesn’t force re-architectures.
• We offer services on OCI and with other Clouds so you can choose the best services for your applications.
• We offer SaaS and Cloud infrastructure, enabling you to run third party, open source, and Oracle technology with equal efficiency.

When you’re considering where to run your Oracle enterprise, it’s advantageous to know that Oracle runs best on Oracle. Hundreds of PeopleSoft customers have moved to OCI since it was launched. From 2017 to 2019, 88% of customers have moved production workloads to OCI. Below are examples of customers who have taken advantage of the Cloud, moving their PeopleSoft over to OCI:

You’ll receive increased business agility with OCI. The slide below shows what you get with the Oracle Cloud and the differences between OCI and other Cloud providers:

The truth is that many customers face difficult challenges regarding a move to the Cloud.

First-generation Clouds were not designed to help you with architecture scale-up, ultra-low latency networking, persistent connections to relational databases, and clustering for availability.

But Oracle OCI is.

At Oracle, we have the flexibility to take care of all of those issues. We make it easy to take advantage of the Cloud with our Enterprise applications, technical computing, and departmental applications.

Your success in the Cloud is our priority. We’ve put together some financial offerings like Cloud Lift services to help provide migration strategy and ease of build-out for tenancy. It’s free of cost. The Cloud Lift services is a dedicated team of engineers to help you.

You can also bring your own licenses to our Cloud with a one-to-one exchange. We offer similar programs utilizing universal credits in which you can  purchase X-amount of dollars of Cloud costs and use them however you would like to.

We’re also working on rewarding you for investing in the Cloud with the Oracle Cloud Support Reward Program. You’ll receive a credit at the end of the year to help reduce your support bill. For every dollar spent, you’ll get 25 cents back in support rewards.

In summary, Oracle has continued to provide and put forward a significant amount of investment to help build out our Cloud. These investments have helped customers like you to take advantage of the Cloud—using Oracle as a single vendor — to run your PeopleSoft workload.

Astute Business Solutions

Astute Business Solutions is a leading Oracle partner for Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft, and Ellucian Banner Solutions

Astute has been associated with Quest and RECONNECT for 16 years, completing over 55 successful Cloud migration projects.

The founders of Astute Business Solutions were working at PeopleSoft previously and have a wealth of knowledge in the technology space. Specifically, they work on:

• PeopleSoft
• Ellucian Banner
• EBS
• DR
• Integration Cloud
• Chatbots
• RPA
• Analytics Cloud
• EXA

There are case studies for each of these on the Astute Business Solutions website.

Astute works hard to maintain their Oracle partner status. They are the only partner that is an Oracle-certified Cloud service provider. They also have the unique distinction of having the expertise, verified by Oracle with customer references, of migrating PeopleSoft to OCI. And they continue to add to their success.

Astute is helping PeopleSoft customers to modernize their businesses by sharing expertise in four main areas: Analytics & Chatbots, Security, Automation, and Simplification.

In the area of analytics and Chatbots, Astute can help you with Oracle Analytics Cloud Accelerators for PeopleSoft, Kibana Analytics, FAQ Bots, PeopleSoft delivered bot skills, and Student Bot.

OCI includes several security features natively, so as customers adopt OCI, they are improving their security posture. Some of the security areas of modernization include application and DB encryption, data masking, intrusion detection/prevention, network security, and SSO/MFA.

Behind the scenes optimization can have a major impact on your business, specifically through automation. You can leverage robotic process automation (RPA), workflow, PeopleSoft test framework, automated monitoring, and automated disaster recovery to protect and advance your business.

For those of you who are looking to move to SaaS eventually, you may want to go ahead and look at your customizations to identify which are must-have versus those that can be replaced with modern functionality. Astute can help with de-customization, automated refresh, and business process re-configuration.

Astute can share their broad range of experience, as indicated by some of their customers displayed below. You’ll find case studies for each on the Astute website.

Successful Shift to OCI

So what is the anatomy of a successful PeopleSoft Life and Shift to OCI?

There are hundreds of customers who are live now. It’s no longer a situation where you would be a guinea pig in moving over.

From a planning perspective for a successful move, you want to consider the following:

This is a stepping stone to several other things you can do on Cloud. Cloud is evolving at such a fast pace. Initially you may just want to lift and shift, positioning your business to take advantage of other technologies in the future.

The fundamentals of a successful migration include:

• Security & Identity
• Disaster Recovery
• Networking & Connectivity
• Observability & Management
• Migration & Deployment & Database Migration
• Resiliency & High Availability
• Cost Management & Governance

*Keep in mind an emphasis on security. It’s so important to secure your workloads in the Cloud. In most cases, your security in the Cloud is better than On-Prem security.

Business as Usual but Better

When PeopleSoft customers move to the Cloud, the theme that has emerged is: Business as Usual But Better. You’ll bring the better part into so many things that OCI offers.

Several PeopleSoft customers are anxious when considering a move to the Cloud and how that may impact customizations. That fear comes up because customers associate Cloud with ERP Cloud or SaaS. But when you think about lifting and shifting to OCI, your customizations go with the application, unchanged. It is not required to de-customize. You can make changes if you’d like to, not because you have to.

Moving to OCI is business as usual, but better. Behind the scenes, you’re getting faster infrastructure, more automation services, and scalability with performance on demand. The process can be seamless for the end user without a visible change on their end. It can be such a smooth transition.

Important Considerations

In terms of networking and connectivity, you’ll want to keep in mind some key considerations:

• Provide secure, high-speed connectivity between Cloud resources and users and/or systems and require access
• Implement primary and secondary VPN tunnels and establish secure connections
• Maintain security posture when running your business-critical PeopleSoft and adjacent apps in Oracle Cloud utilizing:
  • Cloud-native security
  • Secure by default model

The recommended network architecture is a Hub-and-Spoke model. You can establish all of your governance and controls in the hub. Your production can be in one spoke. Non-prod environments can be another spoke. VR can be in a third spoke. This gives you the granularity you need from a security and management standpoint.

There is so much included with OCI when it comes to securing your applications in the Cloud.

Security zones provide prescriptive guardrails that can be used to protect customer data and resources. Cloud Guard helps customers achieve and sustain a strong security posture on OCI. Vulnerability Scanning Service is a simple, on by default, prescriptive and free scanning suite that is tightly integrated with the OCI platform.

For database and application migration, Astute Business Solutions uses Rackware most often. PeopleSoft Cloud Manager is another option if you’re moving smaller instances and a fewer number of PeopleSoft instances.  Oracle has many options for database migration.

PeopleSoft is heavily integrated both between PeopleSoft applications and between PeopleSoft and third party applications. You don’t have to rewrite or re-code any of your interfaces. You’ll use networking technology to repoint your interfaces. Think of it as a change in address. If you have hard-coded, some additional fixes may be necessary.

Astute Business Solutions strongly recommends implementing Disaster Recovery when you move your PeopleSoft applications to the Cloud. You’ll need to consider how long your business could survive without your mission critical applications to select the option that works for you. If you want to use fully automated DR, Astute can help you make that shift.

Once you put these systems in the Cloud, there are a number of applications available —both free and paid—for monitoring.

Automation Tools

Automation is a repeating theme when thinking about moving to Cloud.

These are the automation tools recommended by Astute:

• Terraform for infrastructure as code for build and maintain
• Command Line Interface for programming requirements, configuration management, and reporting
• Jenkins for post-go-live Dev/Ops automation with continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Database Cloud for automated provisioning, backup, monitoring
• Rackware for fully automated Lift and Shift of VMs
• Templates for reference architectures, scripts library, and best practices

Distribution of Responsibility

In taking on a migration projects, it’s important to know what you, as the customers, are responsible for versus Oracle’s responsibility and what hiring a vendor can do for you.

Below is a sample RACI from Astute:

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