5 Essential Preparation Steps for a Successful Oracle EBS to Cloud Migration

Are you one of the many companies preparing to migrate Oracle E-business Suite to OCI, AWS, or Azure? The case for migrating to the cloud is a strong one. For example, cloud deployments have on average 2.3 times lower total cost of ownership than on-premise deployments. But that doesn’t mean moving to the cloud is simple or easy. Get a head start on planning by implementing these 5 critical pre-migration steps.

1. Understand the current on-premise footprint.

Before a cloud migration, it is critical that you do a complete inventory of your current on-premise footprint. This means creating a comprehensive list of your IT environments, including applications, integrations with other applications and systems, interfaces, feeds, databases, and operating systems.

2. Understand the availability and performance SLAs.

Your service level agreements (SLAs) for cloud services might look very different, depending on the precise needs of your business. Some applications need to be truly 24x7x365, without a single second of downtime. Others might have monthly or quarterly service windows during which downtime is acceptable. Whatever your business requirements, the cloud architecture must be designed around them in order to make your applications available whenever you need them.

3. Understand your needs for software integrations.

In this step, ask yourself: what are the applications you currently integrate with, and what will be required after they move to the cloud?

Within an EBS deployment, you have an existing integration with a third-party solution such as Workday, SAP Ariba, or Coupa. These integrations will have to be re-platformed and ported over to the cloud—but first, you’ll have to discover them and understand each one’s function within your environment.

4. Understand the current growth and peak utilization cycles.

Suppose that your enterprise data stores are growing rapidly in size by hundreds of gigabytes per month. As part of your cloud migration, you need to move this data into the cloud as well. Without proper planning, your new environment in the cloud will run out of space and be unable to cope with your storage needs.

5. Understand the security requirements.

A new study from IBM calculates that the average cost of a data breach has risen to $3.9 million, which means that cloud security is understandably a top consideration. Sensitive and confidential data can be stored in the cloud, but it requires more forethought and attention.

Sectors such as healthcare, finance, and retail have strict regulations that govern how organizations may process and store private data, such as payment care information and health care records. Be sure that you select a cloud provider that is capable of complying with these regulations.

This is just a brief overview of what your pre-migration preparations should be. For more technical detail and specific scenarios, download our white paper, “5 Must-Dos to Prepare for an Oracle EBS to Cloud Migration.”