5 Reasons to Migrate Oracle Applications to Azure

As the war for cloud customers continues between ‘as a service’ vendors both large and small, Microsoft Azure continues to maintain its stronghold. With an all-inclusive offering of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, more than 50 active regions around the world, and an appealing free 12 months of service for new customers (restrictions apply), Azure is an appealing solution for companies across the globe.

This story is true for customers looking for an IaaS platform for Oracle applications as well. From Oracle EBS to JD Edwards to PeopleSoft, Azure can support the critical applications that drive your business in a hybrid or fully cloud hosted environment. Here are five reasons to consider moving your Oracle applications to Azure.

1) High Availability

This is one of the top reasons companies choose Microsoft Azure. Compared to other options on the market, Azure has the widest range of availability zones across the globe, offering a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.95%. Each of these zones is made up of individual data centers that function interdependently so that if one zone experiences an unexpected disaster, the other zones can pick up the slack, keeping your data flowing and your business running. If you are running Oracle financial, supply chain, or retail applications that require near-100% uptime, having availability zones that reduce the impact of a failure are a must-have.

2) Scalability

As your business grows, so will your data – and likely so will your application investments. Azure has the ability to host petabytes of data. But even if you’re not there yet, hyper-threaded virtual machines feature up to 128 vCPUs and 6 TB of memory. In addition, with Azure infrastructure flexibility you will always have the storage and compute resources you need, including Azure Disk Storage which offers secure, persistent, and cost-friendly SSD options that can support any and all of your Oracle applications.

3) Disaster Recovery

Reducing downtime and implementing effective disaster recovery is at the forefront of every IT manager’s mind. Azure’s disaster recovery solutions can be integrated with your existing on-premises solutions so you don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel once you migrate your Oracle applications. Regardless, the interface for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery makes it simple to define policies to natively protect, monitor, and manage enterprise workloads.

You also have access to Azure Site Recovery which will enable you to manage disaster recovery for Oracle Linux VMs and on-premises or physical servers that might be supporting your applications.

4) Cost Reduction

Did we mention that Azure is free for 12 months for new customers? This gives you a chance to take it for a test drive before committing for the long term. But if you’re thinking you need to go all-in or not at all, you can save on licensing costs with Azure constrained-core virtual machines that are optimized specifically for Oracle workloads. You can also save a chunk of change with predictable workloads – reserve resources in advance with Azure Reserved VM Instances. Finally, Azure offers three years of extended security updates for Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 for free when you migrate.

5) Analytics & Insights

If you’re at the forefront of your industry and want to leverage innovations like predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to glean data-driven insights from your Oracle applications, Azure has a host of tools for you.
 

• Build data lakes with Azure Data Lake Storage
• Bring limitless scale and powerful insights to the table with Azure Synapse Analytics
• Model and visualize data with Power BI
• Ingest, prepare, and transform your data with Azure Data Factory

Final Thoughts

There are many more reasons to migrate to Azure, but these are the top five benefits of moving your Oracle applications to this top-rated cloud platform. If availability, scalability, cost reduction, and analytics are prime motivators for your organization, it might be time to make the move.

Of course, migrations are not simple undertakings and sometimes it helps to know that other companies have crossed the same territory. To learn about what an Oracle EBS to Azure migration might look like, download our white paper, “Fast Food Chain Completes Successful Oracle EBS Migration to Azure.” You’ll get the details on why this company migrated, how they did it, and the benefits they received.