While Oracle EBS wasn’t suited for private cloud until recently due to performance reasons, public cloud providers like AWS have made significant advances that have eliminated this concern. You can migrate Oracle EBS to AWS to take advantage of the availability, performance, security, and agility that the public cloud has to offer.
But there is a learning curve, and your in-house team may not have the time to plan and manage the migration. A project of this nature requires a team that can guarantee success and has a proven track record.
The first step in a successful migration is finding a partner who has extensive experience moving Oracle EBS environments to AWS. They can design your Oracle EBS environment to maximize your uptime and performance, while allowing you to leverage the full range of AWS capabilities.
Here are seven things to look for when you choose a partner:
1. EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE WITH AWS, ORACLE, AND ORACLE EBS
Choose a partner with the following qualifications:
- AWS technical certifications (e.g., Developers, Solutions Architects, SysOps Administrators)
- AWS Advanced or Premier Partner
- Oracle Sell Partner
- Oracle Certified
- A team that is large enough to scale with you
- Tooling and automation that takes advantage of all that AWS offers
Also look for a partner with advanced compliance and security qualifications that will ensure they adhere to the highest standards, such as:
- Annual Third-Party Business Audits
- System and Organization Controls (SOC 1 & 2)
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- ITIL Certified
2. EXPERTISE WITH MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
Choose a partner who understands the requirements of a 24 x 7 operating model, and who has broad and deep experience architecting systems that integrate the capabilities of compute and storage platforms with the Oracle EBS application and database stacks. Your partner should properly architect a solution that provides greater availability, better performance, and higher levels of security than your current Oracle EBS Platform solution, and all at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Most importantly, your partner must transfer your mission-critical systems to AWS with minimal downtime and without putting you at risk.
Ask for a proof of concept. Look for a partner who runs tests with real data, as this will show you if your workloads run efficiently on AWS. Asking for a test system allows you to check your processing times and get comfortable with AWS before migrating all of your Oracle EBS workloads.
3. A PROVEN MIGRATION PROCESS
A successful migration requires excellent planning. Find a partner early in your migration process, so they can help you define your business case objectives: how will migrating Oracle EBS to AWS help you achieve your business and IT goals? A sure sign of an experienced partner is one that has a dedicated migration project team, including project management and technical resources.
After you define your goals, your partner should inventory your Oracle EBS applications and plan their migration strategies. Then, they should design, migrate, and validate each application – following a meticulous, iterative path to your new operating model. The most successful migrations also include “wins” for the business in terms of Oracle EBS functionality, and a good partner will help you identify and communicate those capabilities to your business partners and end users.
4. A PLAN FOR MIGRATING AND INTEGRATING THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS
Do you have third-party or home-grown applications that touch your Oracle EBS environment? If so, your partner should inventory these applications and advise you on their best migration path.
Your partner should analyze your current architecture and gain an understanding of your integration points, customizations, and external applications, but also delve into your future business requirements. Then, they can work with you to design your cloud environment for each application.
5. ADVANCED AUTOMATION
Automation reduces the risk of errors during your migration, eliminating manual steps and reducing the time it takes to assemble, build, and deploy infrastructure. Look for a partner who applies automation in the following areas:
- Automated Provisioning – get set up with AWS in hours, not days
- Right-sizing and license management, so that you only pay for what you need and only for what is consumed
- 24/7/365 monitoring and alerts to keep your Oracle EBS data secure
- Detect and prevent configuration drift of your AWS resources
- Health checks with self-healing tasks that maintain optimal performance
- Automated patches, backups, and data retention monitoring to ensure that environments are secure and available
6. NEXT-GENERATION SECURITY
Security is a top concern when migrating your mission-critical data to the public cloud. In recent years, public cloud providers have taken steps to make their services as secure – often more secure – than your on-premises environment.
However, this doesn’t guarantee that your Oracle EBS data is protected out of the box when you migrate it to AWS. Your migration partner must take the following steps to enhance your security:
- Leverage AWS capabilities to provide a secure operating environment that is isolated from other customers and includes security controls for your own organization
- Recommend solutions like Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt data-at-rest within the database from privileged users
- Understand and implement EDR solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to spot known and unknown threats
- Provide vulnerability management and penetration testing tools to identify and prioritize risks to minimize the business impact of patching and remediation activities prior to go-live
- Implement a solution to provide regular patching of servers and monitor the integrity of files
Configure a comprehensive solution for operating system, database, and application log management
7. ONGOING CLOUD MANAGEMENT
Choose a partner who can handle your day-to-day Oracle EBS and AWS administration after your migration, while providing you with full visibility into your environment. This will significantly reduce the hours your internal team needs to spend on IT management, giving them more time for projects that matter to the business.
Here are some key things to look for in a managed services partner:
- 24/7/365 support for technical and functional issues
- Comprehensive service level agreements
- Mature, rigorous ITIL-driven operational processes audited using industry standard certifications like SSAE SOC1/2
- A self-service portal with complete visibility into your Oracle EBS cloud environment, including visualizations of your resources and performance metrics
- Comprehensive monitoring and proactive resolution of your application performance at both the application and SQL levels
The above article is an excerpt from our recent eBook, Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite to Amazon Web Services. Click here, to access the complete eBook.
Syntax has over 40 years of Oracle ERP experience and over 25 years providing cloud and managed services for Oracle EBS applications. We are a pioneer in Oracle EBS Cloud Managed Services with automation-driven, best-of-breed private and public cloud offerings on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as well as our own purpose-built enterprise data centers.
Contact us today to discover how we can reduce your risks when you move your Oracle EBS environment to AWS.