Roadmap for Migrating ERP to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Business today is dynamic and digital. The pace of change is accelerating across industries, driven by new technological developments such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, usage of digital platforms, and mobile apps. Many organizations are now considering moving their ERP to the Cloud, since their on-premises systems are outdated, or environment support is nearing expiry.

This blog talks about the top 3 key areas that form the basis of any successful ERP migration:

• Choosing the right cloud platform and services
• Building a risk-free migration plan
• Monitoring and optimization

Choosing the Right Cloud Platform and Services

Once businesses decide to embark on their cloud journey, it becomes imperative to conduct assessments and build a strategy for a successful migration. Zensar has created its proprietary migration framework- “C5 Cloud Migration Framework“, to help customers in migrating enterprise workloads to OCI seamlessly.

Zensar’s assessment report

Below is the report of cloud assessment conducted for a leading Home Warranty Service provider in the US. The client was running 11i on the Exadata system on-premises, which was nearing the end of life for hardware and application. The proprietary tools like TCO and security index calculator have been used.

Cloud Vendor – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was recommended over other non-Oracle solutions looking at business workload and High availability requirements.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis – Yearly saving of 350K USD after migrating to OCI.

Project Estimates – 5 Months to migrate R12.2.8 and peripheral applications like 11g Forms and Disaster Recovery (DR).

Security Posture analysis and improvement plan

• Absence of in-transit and data-at-rest encryption
•  Implementation of Web Application Firewall (WAF) for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and other attacks
•  Configure data vault for the separation of duties
• Configure data safe

The estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) for migrating ERP to OCI is between 30% to 40% less than running ERP on-premises and 45% to 55% less than running on the non-oracle cloud, based on these assumptions:

• Significant savings by eliminating upfront hardware cost, ongoing facilities, IT administration, and support expenses.
• Oracle’s significant cost advantages for bulk volumes and database storage.
• A six-server environment, 80 vCPU per environment cloud deployment.
• Compared to a six server, 280 million per environment on-premises deployment.

Building a Risk-Free Migration Plan

Our cloud migration framework provides a structured approach for migrating ERP to OCI and is built on these tenets:

• Technical validation of operating system, compute, storage (Input Output Per Second; IOPS), network link ( Dynamic Route Gateway; DRG, FastConnect).
• Performance benchmarking for on-premises and OCI environments.
• DR Drill for application and database.
• Systematic Integration and functional testing.
• Security testing.

Zensar has built a proprietary GUI based ZenFLUX migration tool that helps in migrating ERP environments to OCI and automates the ERP migration process.

Monitoring and Optimization

After migration to the cloud, monitoring of various metrics for Cost, Availability, Performance, and Security (CAPS) is of utmost importance to keep cloud costs in control and meet business objectives.

We recommend using below tools and processes to monitor and optimize CAPS:

• OCI tagging while building environments for various projects/business requirements.
• OEM Cloud (Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud) 13c for managing cloud operations.
• Oracle Cloud Management Services (Log Analytics, Application Performance Monitoring, IT Analytics).
• Use OCI Terraform provider and Ansible modules to automate infrastructure deployments.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a full portfolio of infrastructure and database services to run enterprise workload with the same or, in most cases, better performance scales, resilience and security posture. In addition to this, it helps the organization embrace agility in scaling of resources or moving into the next leg of the journey- which is migrating to SaaS. Customers must choose the right technology partner who can help them in realizing the benefits that the cloud has to offer.