According to Gartner, the cloud migration services market is expected to reach $448.34B by 2025, signalling that most businesses are employing multi-cloud strategies to reap the benefits of cloud-based software and infrastructure. While most software companies offer products that can be easily deployed in public cloud environments, not all are simple to migrate without adverse licensing impacts.

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Oracle Software Cloud Migration: Your guide to migrating to the cloud

According to Gartner, the cloud migration services market is expected to reach $448.34B by 2025, signalling that most businesses are employing multi-cloud strategies to reap the benefits of cloud-based software and infrastructure. While most software companies offer products that can be easily deployed in public cloud environments, not all are simple to migrate without adverse licensing impacts.

Oracle and its partners provide quick and seamless solutions to migrate existing workloads. However, Oracle solutions can often prove challenging from a license management perspective, especially without proper guidance or expertise. When using on-premise solutions, Oracle's licensing rules and metric definitions need to be reviewed and analyzed prior to migrating applications to a public cloud environment, such as AWS, Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In order to achieve the intended benefits and maximize the ROI of your Oracle investments, it is critical to perform proper vendor license and contractual diligence before shifting your applications to the cloud.

Understand your licensing and software rights

Oracle is commonly viewed as a strategic technology partner, so it's important to maintain ongoing communication with sales and support representatives across all levels of business to ensure that your Oracle spend aligns with the future needs of your business. In order to do so, it's essential to proactively understand your Effective License Position (ELP) for Oracle, so you can address any net new license requirements or leverage existing software as part of any public cloud migrations.

Like many top IT suppliers, Oracle has a compliance function and periodically conducts software reviews to help protect their IP, but they will collaborate with customers to identify license inefficiencies and address any non-compliance issues prior to migrating applications.

More often than not, companies dive into the public cloud without having proper software licensing insights, later to learn that they are under-licensed or rented the improper size for their target cloud environment. E-Business Solution (EBS) migrations are typically complex and cross-functional in nature, given the business processes that are involved across an organization.

The simplest method of calculating licensing needs in the public cloud is to baseline what's installed today and move products and users as-is. Meaning, if you're running a certain number of database or middleware licenses with a known quantity of application users, you would set up cloud environments that match your current IT architecture, without considering actual usage or Oracle's cloud licensing policies. While it’s easy to implement, this approach often leads to software non-compliance or waste in the public cloud (i.e., oversized instances).  

Avoiding non-compliance issues

Unfortunately, many IT departments lack expertise or aren't up to date on Oracle's dynamic licensing rules, which can lead to major non-compliance issues or unplanned fees. It's important to be prepared and have a firm grasp on licensing nuances and contractual restrictions that can cause inadvertent over-deployments of Oracle software.

Oracle publishes a large array of helpful documentation on how they license their products. Along with their most recent price list, you can verify the standard licensing metrics for each commercially available product. However, you will still need to assess your company’s license agreements for any custom licensing terms negotiated with Oracle to ensure you remain compliant, prior to moving applications to the cloud.

Orchestrating a successful migration

Even if organizations have a solid understanding of their Oracle ELP and clearly recognize their on-premise software requirements, migrating to the cloud presents a whole new set of difficult challenges.

So how do you ensure a smoother Oracle software migration to the cloud? First, make sure you do your homework upfront and arm your team with Oracle licensing experts. Before migrating your Oracle EBS applications and infrastructure to the public cloud, keep the following steps in mind:

Assess your Oracle license entitlements: Get reacquainted with your Oracle license agreements and order documents to verify compliance with current software requirements. Baseline your current Oracle deployments and determine any licensing risks before migrating to the cloud, along with any available software to use.

Diagnose your future Oracle cloud environment: Understand your target environments by partnering with IT stakeholders. What will your target Oracle architecture look like in the cloud? What database, middleware, and EBS software instances will move over? Evaluate the license needs for future cloud environments and be prepared to optimize your Oracle software accordingly.

Understand how cloud migration impacts your Oracle ELP: Dive deep into Oracle's cloud licensing policies and study their impact on all your application environments (Prod, Non-Prod, and DR). Pinpoint potential licensing requirement differences when translating your Oracle instances to the cloud, as it may not likely be a 1:1 exchange and can vary by product.

Determine your public cloud license requirements: Quantify your new Oracle licensing needs based on Oracle's cloud licensing policies, making sure to leverage existing licenses where possible and account for new software purchases, if required. Model a few different scenarios to determine if larger or more powerful VMs are needed to support future Oracle workloads (e.g., 2 vCPUs vs. 4 vCPUs or greater).

Revisit your IT architecture pre and post-Oracle migration: Stay tuned on any configuration changes from your IT stakeholder team, along with any updates to Oracle's cloud licensing policies. Then, adjust your Oracle cloud instance sizing before and after system migrations, accounting for new vendor counting rules or modifications to your Oracle cloud architecture.

Connor Consulting, a partnership for success

While the steps may sound simple, it is vital to the migration process to make sure you have the proper resources for the transition to the cloud. The process will take time, manpower, and funding to orchestrate a successful migration – proactively optimizing costs and mitigating compliance risk.

To learn more on how to successfully migrate your Oracle applications and infrastructure to the public cloud without adding financial and compliance risks, contact one of our expert Oracle license advisors at softwareadvisoryservices@connor-consulting.com today.

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