During Quest Forum Digital Event: Cloud Week, Sandra Cheevers, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at Oracle, gave a presentation on how to start your journey to the cloud by starting from where you are.

The world is changing, and no industry is immune. These changes impact the way people and organizations interact with technology. To survive and evolve, businesses can’t rely on legacy data centers or on-premise complexity in the cloud.

To help organizations innovate, Oracle Cloud offers:

• Intelligent Applications that embed intelligence in cloud applications
• Autonomous Database that extends intelligence into a self-driving database
• Cloud Infrastructure that provides the foundation for AI and autonomous
• On-premises Solutions with choice of deployment and future path

Paths for the Journey to the Cloud

Once a customer decides to move to Oracle Cloud, they may choose from six journeys:

1. Your Data Center > Optimize On-Premises > Oracle Cloud
2. Your Data Center > Cloud at Customer > Oracle Cloud
3. Your Data Center > Move & Improve Workloads
4. Your Data Center > Create New with Database and OCI
5. On-Premises > Upgrade with SAAS
6. New Company > Born in the Cloud

Path 1: Your Data Center > Optimize On-Premises > Oracle Cloud

For the first journey, customer benefits include:

• Optimized Oracle Database Performance
• Scale-out virtualization for applications
• Scalable big-data capabilities
• High-performance unified storage for applications and unstructured data
• Optimized data protection

Path 2: Your Data Center > Cloud at Customer > Oracle Cloud

For the second journey, customers receive a complete public cloud experience delivered in their own data center behind their firewall. This subscription-based Oracle Cloud at Customer delivers:

• Public Cloud Feature Set
• Public Cloud Financial Model
• Public Cloud Operational Model
• Retained IT Control
• Seamless Operations

Regarding AT&T’s decision to use the Cloud at Customer option, Chief Strategy Officer John Donovan said, “We believe that the future of the network is to be data-powered, to be software-centric, and to be fast and responsive. This collaboration with Oracle accelerates our network transformation and migration to the cloud to expand efficiency, performance, and reduce cost while improving overall customer service.”

Path 3: Your Data Center > Move & Improve Workloads

For the third journey, which involves moving and improving, OCI allows customers to:

• Migrate and deploy workloads; auto-migration
• Bring app dev platforms & containers
• Run high performance, cloud native & ML-apps
• Access multiple layers of protection, attack detection

Specific OCI capabilities include:

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

Path 4: Your Data Center > Create New with Database and OCI

For the fourth journey—building new with database and OCI—there are unique advantages including powerful analytics, advanced compute and storage, and domain and industry apps. Oracle Autonomous Database offers a new category of cloud services with automation based on machine learning. Major characteristics are as follows:

• Self-driving – automatically provision, secure, monitor, backup, recover, tune and upgrade
• Self-securing – automatically apply security patches with no downtime
• Self-repairing – maximize availability; downtime < 2.5 min/mon for planned and unplanned

Path 5: On-Premises > Upgrade with SAAS

For the fifth journey to the cloud, customers may move their entire organization to Oracle’s SAAS applications. This option includes:

• Integrated suite spanning every category
• Empowerment, personalization for all channels
• Improved operational efficiency
• Ease in turning insights to action
• AI-based intelligence for automated outcomes

Path 6: New Company > Born in the Cloud

For the last journey, a start-up company can be born in the cloud, where they may begin running on day one. There’s no need to purchase machinery or infrastructure.

Conclusion

No matter which pathway a customer chooses, the journey ultimately leads to:

• A complete integrated stack with intelligent solutions at every layer—enabling tomorrow, today
• Embedded intelligence in Oracle apps and cloud services
• Extended intelligence in Oracle platform for anyone to build on
• A foundation for AI and autonomous

To learn more, check out Cheevers’ Cloud Week presentation and additional resources attached below.