How to Successfully Migrate from Oracle EBS to Microsoft Azure

So you’ve weighed your options and decided that you want to migrate Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to Microsoft Azure.

 
The good news is, you’re in good company. According to RightScale’s 2019 “State of the Cloud” report, 94% of companies now use cloud computing in some form or fashion. And Microsoft Azure is one of the top contenders among cloud platform companies. With high availability, hybrid flexibility, and the option to use its infrastructure, platform, or software as a service capabilities, Azure is an easy choice for companies large and small.

Now that you know what platform you’re using, it’s time to think about how to get there. To help you understand the intricacies of executing an Oracle EBS to Azure migration we’re going to do a brief review of a migration we completed for a Fortune 500 fast food chain.

The fast-food chain reached out to Datavail’s team due to our long-standing relationship as their support partner for Oracle EBS. They knew the migration would not be simple and would necessitate Datavail’s deep understanding of their EBS environment to make the project a success. Together, the teams built a Proof of Concept and found that Azure could meet the requirements of the project.

Datavail immediately brought together teams and technology to execute the planning phase in preparation for migrating the data and building the environment in Azure. The organization was running Oracle EBS 12.1.3 and needed to build two environments and four servers for EBS Financials in Azure cloud.

The second major challenge was a matter of complexity and innovation: few Oracle EBS environments have ever been migrated to Azure. It was up to the Datavail team to pave the way by applying expertise and decades of experience to find the best way to execute the migration. With Oracle EBS being one of the crucial enterprise applications for financial operations, the company relied on the system to operate predictably both during and after the migration. Performance issues, latency, and downtime needed to be kept to a minimum and the new cloud environment needed to operate as seamlessly as the on-premises one did.

To prepare for the migration, Datavail followed five important steps:

1. Understand the current on-premises footprint. We created a comprehensive list of the IT environment including applications, integrations with other applications and systems, interfaces, feeds, databases, and operating systems.
2. Understand the availability and performance SLAs. We designed the cutover around the uptime and downtime requirements and financial close schedules to ensure the applications would be available when necessary.
3. Understand the need for software integrations. We identified the third-party applications that either needed to maintain their connection points, or be re-platformed and ported over to the cloud.
4. Understand the current growth and peak utilization cycles. Our EBS experts gathered data from the peak window, super peak window, and other utilization cycles and compared them against the capabilities of the Azure VM to ensure application performance would be maintained across the year.
5. Understand the security requirements. We fully educated ourselves on the security and privacy requirements of the chain so that the cloud platform would deliver exactly as their on-premises environment had.

For a complex and business-critical environment like this, the devil was in the details. The Datavail team worked with the customer applications team and third-party resources to ensure every connection point of the environment would perform as expected. Additional migration preparation steps included:

• Preparing and cleansing the data (e.g. removing scratch files and backups, or archiving and compressing large amounts of relatively small files).
• Validating data integrity by checking for corruption and usability after the migration.
• Optimizing network transfer speeds.
• Testing and confirming data flow to integrated applications.
• Preparing the data for use once it’s in the cloud.

The Azure migration was a resounding success. Oracle EBS and every backend solution was migrated to the cloud while meeting the performance requirements of interface jobs and downtime. With less than six hours of cutover time – much lower than the two-day average for an environment of this size – the applications went live in Azure.

The Fortune 500 fast food chain now has a fully-functional Oracle EBS environment running in Azure that has enabled them to reduce their infrastructure costs, give their users greater access and flexibility in the applications, and enable the business to function with greater agility.

Are these the results your organization is looking for? For more details on how we executed this Oracle EBS to Azure migration, download the full case study here. You can also reach out to our experienced Oracle EBS and Microsoft Azure team to discuss how we can help you with your migration.