The Gravity of Cloud Data Management

In the Cloud Data Management space, this recent industry article caught my attention: “AWS CEO: 'Some businesses are trying to fight gravity'” dated June 22, 2020, as reported here. The article stated: “The chief exec said that many CIOs are reluctant to start moving their organisation to the cloud because they fear it will make their position redundant. "I think that there is still a segment of companies who are trying to fight gravity," he said.”

We beg to differ. Here is why.

At Oracle, we interact with CIOs and IT / Data architects all the time. We have witnessed the cloud evolution over the last several years. Make no mistake. Organizations are not reluctant to move to cloud. The transition to cloud is happening in the enterprise at a remarkable pace, and we have been an active partner in this transition by enabling a suite of Cloud Services deployed in Oracle Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions across the world. Our goal is to have 36 cloud regions globally by the end of 2020.

In the data management space, we have brought services such as Exadata Cloud Service and Autonomous Database to our OCI regions, so that customers can leverage our unique enterprise-scale infrastructure and cloud agility benefits as they transition to Public Cloud. In addition, since we uniquely offer a consistent Oracle database experience across on-premises and in the Cloud, our customers can make this transition and incur cloud benefits with as little disruption as possible, as exemplified in this article: “7-Eleven Trusts Core Applications and Disaster Recovery to Oracle Cloud”.

So, where is our disagreement coming from?

Well, that is where the other “gravity” comes in. Namely, data gravity.

Data gravity is a term coined by Dave McCrory in a 2010 blog post, referring to the way data attracts other data and services, implying that large accumulations of data are more likely to accrue even more data and their associated applications and services. When this happens over time, it leads to a tight coupling (entanglement) of data, application and business-processes. Gartner discusses how data gravity and entanglement will guide cloud migraton in their report, "Understanding Cloud Data Management Architectures: Hybrid Cloud, Multicloud and Intercloud", Published 27 May 2020, Adam Ronthal, Donald Feinberg, ID - G00717499.

While many companies have successfully transitioned their entire application stack to our public cloud, we have found that for large organizations, the issue of systems entanglement is often the biggest hindrance to a widespread public cloud adoption. Yes, there are other reasons too – data residency laws, operational ownership issues, really legacy applications, etc. However, as enterprises go through their usual mergers and acquisitions, business model transformations, as well as changes in management structure and associated vendor relationships, they have found that it is often hard, and sometimes impossible, to delineate a cohesive set of data and applications that can be migrated to cloud. Yet, these sets of business critical systems are in desperate need of the agility and efficiency that a cloud-based model offers.

This is where Oracle’s Cloud@Customer strategy comes in.

With Cloud@Customer, we are saying: Dear customer, we understand you have genuine, practical constraints to migrate some of your essential systems to public cloud. But, have no fear, let us bring our Gen 2 cloud to you, to your data centers, so that you can reap the cloud benefits from Day 1, with minimal disruption.

We enable this in two ways:

1. Given that the core business asset for any company is data, we start with the organization’s databases, and since late 2016, we have been offering the Exadata Cloud@Customer solution. With this cloud solution, an organization can deploy their Oracle databases in a cloud-consumption, pay-as-you-go, OPEX-driven subscription model, on the most advanced database platform available today – Exadata. In this model, customers still retain management ownership of their databases, but Oracle assumes ownership of the underlying Exadata infrastructure. Customers simply consume databases as a service (think cloud automation and REST APIs), consumption is metered on their database core usage, and they can burst CPU capacity up and down driven by business cycles, with no application downtime. By the way, last year, we upgraded this offering to our Gen 2 Cloud, which means now the Cloud Control Plane can be deployed in the nearest OCI region, and this has significantly streamlined the deployment experience.
2. For customers who want to adopt this Cloud@Customer strategy on a much broader scale, last month we announced Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. With this solution, we don’t just offer your favorite Oracle Database as a service, but a broad suite of our OCI Gen 2 Cloud Services – more than 50 cloud services – in a self-contained cloud region dedicated for you, with the same underlying architecture (including network, compute, storage, security, etc.) as our Gen 2 cloud. This solution delivers the exact same tools and APIs available in our public cloud regions for a truly consistent development experience across on-premises and public cloud. And yes, we are responsible for all operations, including hardware support and capacity management, so that you can focus on your business priorities. You can find additional details here.

In case you are wondering whether you can deploy our highly innovative Autonomous Database in either of these two models – yes, you can! With Autonomous Database available in your data center, you can now transition database operational tasks off to Oracle Cloud Ops as well as the database’s machine learning-driven self-managing capabilities, thereby enhancing your business efficiencies to unparalleled levels!

Note that our Cloud@Customer model is not a one-way street. While it enables you to implement a cloud strategy very efficiently, you deploy the same Oracle database with its converged set of capabilities as you would in public cloud. This means you can transition to a public cloud model gradually, with no application changes and no business disruption.

So, net-net, we offer an incredibly flexible and immensely powerful cloud portfolio, focused on architecture identicality (ref. this blog: https://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2020/07/09/finally-private-cloud-identical-to-public-cloud). Our Cloud@Customer solution set exemplifies what a low-risk high-reward cloud investment could be. At Oracle, we don’t think that our enterprise customers are fighting cloud gravity. Instead, we are partnering with them to better understand their practical constraints, and bringing our Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure directly to them whenever appropriate.

For example, Crédit Agricole CIB, the Corporate and Investment Banking arm of the Crédit Agricole Group, which is one of the world’s largest banks, have successfully deployed Exadata Cloud@Customer to address their business needs. This is what Pierre-Yves Bollard, Global Head of Finance IT, stated: “Moving to Exadata Cloud@Customer has significantly improved our accounting information systems performance, which has enabled us to carry out our accounting closing process with much greater agility and to reduce our operational costs. The high value provided by the Exadata Cloud@Customer infrastructure has been recognized by all IT and business teams.”

Greater agility, reduce costs and high value – these are all essential elements of any cloud journey! We are thrilled to partner with our enterprise customers in this very exciting cloud journey.