5 Benefits of Upgrading from Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Enterprises are gradually moving from costly and inflexible on-premises environments to the cloud, and rightly so. This new way of doing things offers tremendous benefits. Enterprises can scale up or down on-demand and provision infrastructure without having to master complex and costly equipment, software, and security solutions. 

Upgrading from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is very much a part of this evolution. This article explores some of the most important benefits of this shift, from security to hosting flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and more.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a cloud platform and, more suitably, an amalgamation of complementary cloud services that help businesses create and run customizable and scalable applications. OCI, on the back of its robust hardware instances and efficient virtual network, emphasizes end-to-end design improvement. 

In other words, OCI hosts the entire business portfolio – from enterprise and technical to departmental applications. This is made possible via analytics cloud, API gateways, Big Data services, container engines, content management, secure databases, DevOps, load balancing, resource management, etc. 

OCI has made significant strides against its mainstream competitors, AWS and Azure, in the past few years. Senior analyst and Forbes contributor, Patric Moorhead, says that Oracle’s “hardware manufacturing experience” and collaborations with “semiconductor suppliers such as Intel, NVIDIA, Ampere, and AMD” empower OCI to deliver a full spectrum of high-performance cloud services that strongly rival the likes of Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Moving entirely to the cloud is a no-brainer in the modern business landscape. However, understanding the benefits and trade-offs of upgrading from Oracle EBS to OCI sure remains a crucial aspect before making a final decision.

This isn’t to imply that Oracle E-Business Suite is any less than one of the best ERP software packages available today. In fact, with more than 200 implementable applications and scalable SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, the Oracle EBS suite is bound to be one of the most convenient templates for business management.

However, the fact remains that Oracle cloud infrastructure is well worth the investment – significantly more than Oracle EBS in isolation. As a matter of fact, Oracle advocates for this migration. The company makes it easy to seamlessly migrate customer environments and related configurations from on-prem EBS to EBS on the cloud. 

According to Oracle, this migration results in a 38% decrease in the total cost of ownership (TCO). Compared to AWS, this upgrade comes out to be 44% cheaper! 

Many businesses that have upgraded from Oracle EBS to OCI have reported 2X to 3X improvement in application performance and turnaround times. On that note, let’s have a more profound look at some of the top benefits of upgrading from Oracle EBS to OCI:

High-Performance Needs Covered

Oracle cloud infrastructure can consistently handle high volumes of data, manage connections to multiple applications, and respond to varying lightning-fast requests. This is possible via OCI’s bare metal instances, robust logical networks, and elastic storage systems. 

For instance, OCI offers throughput in GB/s and 51.2 TB of NVMe (non-volatile memory express) storage. It equips businesses to carry out multi-fold read-write operations (in millions) in seconds. OCI thus ensures a substantial reduction in the time taken for data access, thus significantly cutting down on expenses.

From a logical standpoint, the above capabilities result in 2-5 times faster access and control of business data than on-prem solutions. 

Cost Savings

As explained above, OCI reduces TCO, resulting in massive cost savings. Moreover, OCI benefits the capital expenditure (CAPEX) front by lowering upfront costs – thanks to reduced reliance on hardware configuration and maintenance. 

Then obviously, there’s the benefit of the pay-as-you-go model – wherein cloud usage is billed per service utilization. Businesses can adjust compute power and storage and only pay as per actual usage. 

Such flexibility reduces overheads and makes it much easier for IT to budget and plan ahead. This is particularly true when handling seasonal or event-based spikes in the business workflow.

The good thing is the low cost while upgrading to OCI. Oracle specifically addresses that by helping automate deployment and migration via specific tooling. 

Operational Efficiency

Businesses have complex and firm operational needs. Regardless of an enterprise’s size or scale, it is important to tailor-make cloud solutions that match and exceed expectations. 

And this is exactly what Oracle cloud infrastructure does best. OCI’s hosting architecture and management infrastructure are uniquely designed for scalability, resilience, and automation. This delivers an optimal level of agility within the target business environment. 

First off, you can move applications to a cloud environment seamlessly. Additionally, you can manage components within an application and its configuration on the fly. 

In other words, enterprises can cut down on the routine IT maintenance and administration actions considerably. The availability of low-code, container-based, and robust REST APIs also aids in devising numerous customizations according to business needs. All of this happens without compromising the security of your critical data.

Security and Compliance

Since we’re on security, let’s dive a bit deeper. OCI follows zero-trust network principles. It securely isolates components to ensure that no data is unauthorizedly accessible from any source – Oracle included. 

Encrypted security layers working along the principles of least-privilege identity, network control, and data privacy are built into the infrastructure. To make this work seamlessly, OCI follows strict rules and rigorous auditing protocols.

On top of that, OCI remains compliant with regional and global regulatory requirements, including GDPR and HIPAA. With this, businesses can rest assured that they will be compliant with regulations and national data policies in order to handle sensitive data.

Hybrid Cloud Configuration Support

With OCI’s flexible architecture, businesses can run applications in their data centers. Depending on their architectural needs, they can also mix and match traditional or new APIs. 

They can configure and manage hybrid cloud configurations by defining and re-configuring application components. This helps to develop and modify applications and services on the fly – with minimal overhead.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is an upgrade from Oracle EBS that businesses can take advantage of. It is a way to optimize costs, enhance security, actualize greater operational efficiency, and reduce TCO. 

And with seamless migration and management capabilities, the whole process is more or less painless. But it doesn’t end there.

To make the most of OCI, you must pay attention to how well it fits your enterprise’s needs. For instance, are the citizen developers able to configure it correctly? Are you able to utilize the Oracle E-Business Suite? How is the continuous testing schedule coming along? How well are you placed to handle the Oracle objects?

With so many moving parts, it’s easy to overlook the granular aspects and miss the boat altogether. Thankfully, ACCELQ provides a proven Oracle test automation solution to turn an upgrade from Oracle EBS to OCI into a success story. From real-time release alignment to in-sprint automation, ACCELQ helps you make sense of the technical architecture and its impact on your existing and future systems.

Get in touch for further questions.