The economic uncertainties over the past few years have driven many businesses to streamline internal processes, reduce costs, and seek to maximize the performance of their tools. This has led many Oracle users to adopt the cloud. To get more insight into how Oracle customers are adopting the cloud, Apps Run the World surveyed 223 Oracle customer organizations primarily in the U.S. to determine how their technology infrastructure is being updated and modernized for the cloud. This report discusses the benefits and roadblocks that Oracle customers have encountered during their transition to the cloud.  

Companies are moving to the cloud because of all the great perks it can offer to your business. Improved performance and efficiency are two key benefits of moving to the cloud, but half of the customers report some challenges with the transition. Common challenges include getting the correct performance levels, attempting to migrate multiple Oracle applications simultaneously, lifting and shifting complex workloads, and establishing costs associated with migrating to the public cloud.  

Key findings from the report include: 

  • More than half of the organizations surveyed (57%) are using Oracle cloud infrastructure as their IaaS provider, 32% AWS, and 11% Microsoft Azure.  
  • 37% of respondents are pushing E-Business Suite to the cloud, 26% are moving PeopleSoft, 19% are moving JD Edwards, and 10% are moving Hyperion.  
  • 72% run a quarter to half of their workloads on-premises, 18% have less than a quarter still on-premises while 10% report they have more than half of their workloads on-premises. 
  • Scalability and easier access to IT infrastructure are the two biggest reasons Oracle customers adopt the cloud, as cited by 94% and 88% of customers 
  • Other benefits include better performance, high availability and resiliency, digital business agility, and lower cloud infrastructure costs.  
  • The biggest challenges faced by Oracle customers moving to the cloud include getting the needed performance levels (44%), database migration (42%), and code and architecture changes (41%).  

The companies that are migrating their Oracle applications to the cloud range from large corporations to government entities and beyond. FedEx, for example, was able to successfully migrate 500 terabytes of production data in seven months. This migration gave the company the ability to experience faster invoices and payment processing and has resulted in double-digit performance. Meanwhile, the State of Texas is working on migrating to OCI to achieve across-the-board performance improvements. The state estimates that they will save 50% on costs over five years by completing the project by the fiscal year 2025.  

As companies continue to evolve post-pandemic, there are a few key takeaways that are more pronounced than ever. More companies across industries are moving their mission-critical workloads to the cloud to save on costs and remain competitive. At the same time, enterprises are not able to sacrifice performance because components of the organization are being scrutinized for their ability to continue improving the business.  IT executives should be mindful of improving performance while being cost conscious. Although there have been challenges moving to the cloud, none are insurmountable.  

The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform makes it possible to accelerate the migration of Oracle workloads to the cloud without sacrificing performance speeds when moving out of the datacenter. The platform acts as a virtualization layer that sits between your workloads and the underlying cloud infrastructure. From there, Silk offers up to 10x faster performance on the cloud compared to native cloud alone. And with cost saving data services such as deduplication and zero-footprint snapshots, Silk customers can cut their cloud costs in half.  

One Silk customer who was able to successfully exit the datacenter and reduce its Oracle licensing commitments was a telecommunications provider in the US. It had a corporate initiative to move its Oracle workloads to Microsoft Azure within a 12-18 month timeframe. Yet to do this successfully, their workloads would need to go through a serious refactor – something that could not be done by the company’s deadline.  

With Silk, the company was able to meet its deadline and continue to manage its Oracle applications in the same way they were managed on-prem. Silk also helped the company reduce its runtime for reporting by 50% and significantly reduced Oracle licensing costs.  

Interested in learning how other CIOs are tackling the problem of migrating Oracle to the cloud? Read the full report here.