An overview of Oracle’s Cloud Computing Strategy

As part of Quest Forum Digital Event: Innovation Week, Sandra Cheevers, Senior Director of Oracle Cloud Product Marketing, presented an overview of Oracle’s Cloud Computing strategy. Cheevers discussed Intelligent Applications, Autonomous Database, and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as the complete solution for your organization’s needs.

Each piece of the Oracle Cloud builds upon the underlying platform. Applications are developed to run on top of the Oracle Database, which runs on top of the infrastructure. With this in mind, Oracle has greatly leveraged the capability of the technology stack beneath each layer. Oracle, and therefore their customers of Oracle Cloud offerings, have full access to the underlying technologies across all levels.

Additionally, on-premise solutions are providing a complete choice of deployment and future path. Oracle allows you to make your own choice of how, when, and where you want to deploy. If you have an existing investment in Oracle technology, you can view your data regardless of where it is located. As the image below displays, Oracle customers can utilize all of the same standards, products, and management across both the On-Prem Cloud and the Public Cloud. You can even move workloads between On-Prem and the public cloud.

Intelligent Business Applications

Oracle provides Intelligent Business Applications, allowing you to run your entire business in the cloud. These applications seamlessly connect to enable organizations and people to be better informed, more productive, and increasingly engaged.

Intelligent business applications are a complete, integrated suite of categories including ERP, SCM, HCM, and CX Cloud. They allow the user to create modern experiences with improved performance. AI is available to automate tasks in order for users to focus on innovation, leveraging capabilities of both the cloud and the employee. Internet of Things (IoT), bots, and personalized UI transactions are some of the technologies built into these intelligent apps.

Intelligent apps must be able to communicate with one another. A use case example regards your company receiving an order through an external website. The system should be able to communicate with a separate app running your inventory to determine if and when you can fulfill the order. Intelligent Business Apps allow this seamless connection.

Each of the Oracle Cloud applications has had intelligence added into them for the purpose of making intelligent decisions on the organization’s behalf. For example, if you are low on stock, the system can alert you to order more.

As mentioned above, these apps are built on the Oracle stack. Because they run on this award-winning platform, you can choose to extend and enrich them as you see fit. You can automate and visualize insights across apps and data. You have secure access across on-prem and the cloud. You are even able to connect cloud apps to on-prem and third-party apps.

Oracle Autonomous Database

The Oracle Autonomous Database is the new category of Cloud services with automation based on Machine Learning. A 2020 report revealed that IT teams spend about 80 percent of their time on maintenance. Additionally, 95 percent of DBAs are creating and updating databases manually. Therefore, IT is placing the majority of their time and energy toward keeping the lights on.

Oracle introduced the Autonomous Database to liberate IT to focus on innovation and advancement. It is the first fully autonomous database in the industry, boasting self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing capabilities.

• Self-Driving: Automates all database and infrastructure management, monitoring, tuning
• Self-Securing: Protects from both external attacks and malicious internal users
• Self-Repairing: Protects from all downtime including planned maintenance

In closer detail, Oracle has spent the last 20 years automating database technology and continues to do so:

The Oracle Autonomous Database hides the complexity of the infrastructure, database automation, and automated data center operations with machine learning underneath. The system can self-detect and self-heal. Autonomy eliminates the likelihood of human error and lowers the associated cost.

There are two versions of Oracle Autonomous Database at this time. The Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) loads data warehouse in seconds. It is optimized for analytics and allows you to deploy any new datamarts, warehouses, or lakes in the cloud. The Autonomous Transaction Processor (ATP) leverages Exadata to run millions of transactions per second. It is tailored specifically to a transaction processing workload. Additionally, it is optimized for mixed workloads such as Mission Critical DBs and App Dev.

Furthermore, the Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates complexity by the Autonomous DB, autonomous Linux, and a converged database. It creates security through OS, Cloud, Database, integrated blockchain, self-patching, and masking. Finally, the Autonomous Database removes limits with fully elastic, free services.

Database innovations include:

• Dedication for security, isolation, and operational policies
• Exadata Cloud at Customer now on Gen2 Could Infrastructure
• Autonomous Database Cloud at Customer— coming soon
• RoCE-based database machine that delivers over 12 million IOPS

Oracle recognizes that at the moment, the vast majority of enterprise workloads are still on-prem. However, customers are interested in the benefits of moving to the cloud. There are constraints that prevent consumption of the public cloud. These issues include data sovereignty due to regulatory compliance, sensitive on-prem data, or custom security standards. Additional issues of keeping control over business-critical systems and latency in connection cause hesitation for several organizations.

The question then is how to receive the benefits of a public cloud without moving data to a public cloud. Oracle provides the solution with Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer. This is a complete public cloud experience delivered in your data center, behind your firewall. It gives you the same feature set, financial model, and licensing as the other Oracle Cloud services. However, you retain complete control of the environment.

The customer can choose how to deploy, as displayed below:

Exadata Cloud at Customer offers all of the value of the Oracle Autonomous Database and platform. Plus, the database machine innovation for Exadata is available.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the second-generation cloud. The aim is to provide the highest possible performance for compute capability and scale. Governance, control, and security are provided, as well as simple migration and the ability to run all workloads. There is open interoperability and multi-cloud support. This is a new architecture environment specifically built to meet customer scalability and availability needs.

Some of the specifics incorporated across OCI are listed below:

• Compute — Supports AI, traditional, and HPC workloads
• Networking — Predictable, low latency, isolation, and availability
• Storage — High performance local, block, and object storage
• Security — DNS, DDoS protection, secure sensitive data, mitigate breaches
• Cloud Native — Open source frameworks, containers, and serverless platform

Leveraging Oracle Partnerships

Oracle and Azure are partners in order to empower customers to implement new levels of capability for digital transformation. This partnership leverages existing investments in Oracle and Microsoft technology. You can connect best-in-class cloud services across both companies. New expanded Regions are available to run your global applications and services.

Oracle and VMware have extended a partnership from on-prem to OCI. This gives access to the Autonomous Database and Exadata with a lift-and-shift capability of VMware workloads to OCI.

Because it is a complete infrastructure environment, OCI can be used for anything. Oracle Generation 2 Cloud services include App Dev, integration, analytics, security, and the autonomous database. OCI momentum can be identified with rapid global data center expansion, open cloud interoperability with Microsoft and VMware, growing momentum with ISV ecosystem, and autonomous OS running on OCI. Oracle is working to expand the global footprint, as shown below:

It is difficult for organizations to imagine data leaving their country or region. Latency could also be an issue over distance. Therefore, Oracle is expanding its footprint.

Key Takeaways of Oracle’s Cloud Computing Strategy

With all of this in mind, you can leverage your current investment with license mobility to cloud via Bring Your Own License. Preserve your investments in people and processes by migrating to the cloud as you determine it is best for your organization. There is universal access to current and future Oracle services. Oracle provides simple migration paths and services to support a move to the cloud.

For increased ease and decreased cost, invest in Intelligent Applications, Autonomous Database, and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as the complete solution for your organization’s needs.

To learn more, check out Cheever’s Innovation Week presentation attached below.