Oracle EBS 12.1 Premier Support EOS: Why You Should Migrate to an IaaS Solution

With just a few months to go before Oracle EBS 12.1 becomes officially de-supported, companies both large and small are scrambling to complete their upgrades to 12.2 or migrations to the cloud.

 
Some companies, however, are delaying taking action or simply haven’t been able to determine the best path forward.

While upgrading is the most obvious solution, there are alternative options that may have greater long-term benefits: either migrating to Oracle’s software as a service ERP cloud offering or moving their Oracle EBS applications to an infrastructure as a service cloud solution. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why many companies choose to migrate Oracle EBS to IaaS cloud.

IaaS Eases an Oracle EBS to Cloud Migration

Companies across the globe are making heavy investments in IaaS – corporate spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $29 billion in 2020. Moving to an IaaS cloud solution is a bit of a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario. If you are heavily invested in your Oracle EBS on-premises footprint, you have a range of customized configurations you don’t want to change, or you want to take advantage of cloud scalability, IaaS is a great way to make it happen.

When you move EBS to IaaS, your on-premises footprint stays essentially the same – you retain the same applications, configurations, and integrations. The only difference from an operational perspective is that they are hosted in the cloud and your internal infrastructure team manages your environment remotely. This is incredibly valuable given that EBS has over 200 applications and is considered a core business platform.

EBS to IaaS Cloud Migration Use Cases

These days it’s hard to make the case for not moving to the cloud. But why are companies moving Oracle EBS to IaaS, specifically? Here are some of the primary reasons:
 

• Application Performance: Since most companies are trying to keep costs low, they don’t want to invest in more infrastructure than they need. This can lead to insufficient computing resources. IaaS providers are hosting thousands of instances so they have a reliable, redundant, and robust setup that delivers a high level of performance that would be difficult to justify for a single company. This means greater efficiencies, faster compute speeds, and better application performance for you.
• Decreased Capex: When a cloud provider takes over your hardware management, you no longer have the expense of infrastructure to worry about. This decreases your Capex investments and opens up budget for other, more strategic initiatives.
• Scalability: With IaaS, you can ramp up the number of environments you need as often as you need, and it can be done within just a few hours – much more efficient than an on-premises expansion which requires additional equipment, contracts, and a five- or ten-year commitment. You can also shut down excess capacity when demand is low, lowering your expenses rather than leaving you wondering what to do with all the additional hardware.
• Easy Expansion: When your organization expands into a new market or acquires a company, you won’t need to purchase new hardware to support it. You can simply connect them to your cloud infrastructure, and ramp up services as needed.
• Disaster Recovery: If your company has multiple locations, you likely have to have disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans for each one. IaaS providers eliminate this need by handling DR and BC for you. They also have availability zones across the globe to help distribute the load and enable you to stay compliant with data security requirements.
• Increased Strategic Focus: Because the cloud has taken a lot of core concerns off your plate, your IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives that deliver higher value to the business and better service to users.

Final Thoughts

In addition to these benefits, companies that choose to move to IaaS have a host of cloud providers to choose from. Most managers of Oracle EBS choose to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because it is designed to support these types of workloads. There are plenty of other options, however, like AWS, Azure, and Google that have platforms that are equally performative and may have running offers that bring significant value to your business.

It’s important to note that an Oracle EBS 12.2 upgrade is recommended before moving to an IaaS solution. While older versions can certainly function in the cloud, most of them are out of support and, as we all know, 12.1 will soon be out of support as well.

To learn more about making the decision between upgrading Oracle EBS or moving to a SaaS or IaaS cloud solution, download our white paper, “Oracle EBS 12.1 End of Support: The Ultimate Guide to Determining Your ERP Future.”