Oracle talks about the implications of the hybrid cloud
Enterprise computing is a different beast altogether from what it used to be back in the 80s when the idea du jour and the pinnacle of success was the establishment of your own data center and your own closed off tech infrastructure.
The emergence of more reliable and faster broadband connectivity and drastically cheaper storage counted in pennies brought about a renaissance of sorts, at least on the enterprise side of things as business owners could get in on the ground floor without chunking out for a ton of hardware or storage that they may not necessarily use to full capacity.
Of course, as with anything, the fly in the ointment with cloud computing was often fully integrating it with legacy systems or having to trash everything and start over from scratch as well as complications with data sovereignty. Some organisations simply can’t let their data leave the country, let alone their premises; a challenge in a day and age where everything and anything is shoved to the cloud.
Mr. Leong Kam Hong, Storage Product Director for Oracle
After the heady wild days of embracing a completely cloud based solution, businesses are, pun notwithstanding, exploring business solutions that provide the best of both worlds which is what Oracle was espousing in a recent series of interviews.
“One of the biggest challenges facing enterprise customers in today’s challenging environment is in managing their data centers effectively,” says Mr. Leong Kam Hong, Storage Product Director for Oracle, “they are facing challenges on scaling up and moving their workload efficiently to the cloud as their requirements increase.” He elaborated more on the costs involved as the size and computing capacity of a data center were often over or under utilised, both leading to their own set of complications. In the old days, scalability was a one-way solution – you had to invest in more hardware.
“One of the biggest challenges facing enterprise customers in today’s challenging environment is in managing their data centers effectively.” Leong Kam Hong, Storage Product Director for Oracle
With the advent of cloud computing, not only storage capacity but even processing cycles can be shunted to the cloud. Data intensive tasks like crunching the human genome or heavy mathematical computing tasks that require what once needed a warehouse full of mainframes can now all be sent to the cloud.
”The cloud is here today and not only storage but computing capacity can be moved to the cloud – companies can take advantage of this to minimise costs as high capacity bursts of processing can be shunted to the cloud during peak periods while retaining a more compact data center to keep costs manageable.”
Mr. Leong Kam Hong, Storage Product Director for Oracle
In business since 1977, the Oracle we know today primarily deals with enterprise customers with an emphasis on total infrastructure solutions from top to bottom from storage, middleware, compute to database applications. Essentially, rather than giving you the Ikea equivalent for enterprise solutions and expecting you to sort the whole thing out with an Allen key, Oracle crafts a bespoke solution that gets you everything, lock, stock and barrel including the kitchen sink.
“What Oracle can offer is a totally integrated solution in terms of both hardware and software for customers. Whereas other vendors are able to offer one or the other and the customer often requiring to integrate multiple solutions from different vendors into their business, Oracle is able to offer an engineered system specific to the customer that maximises productivity while minimising costs,” says Kam Hong.
At a recent symposium for vendors, he highlighted the array of services Oracle offered to enterprise customers. “Oracle is able to offer engineered systems specific to the customers’ as well as the ability to establish a private cloud.” said Kam Hong. “We have also just launched the ‘Managed Cloud for Customers service in Malaysia.”
The service, also dubbed as the Oracle Cloud Machine has Oracle integrating their hardware solutions into a customer’s data centre but managing it on OPEX model on premise. Boiled down, this means that customers purchase the software and hardware to create their own managed cloud solution. This is a necessity in certain businesses that require data sovereignty such as banks though this isn’t exactly the norm for most customers.
“While we are able to provide a managed cloud for customers and cater to the need for data sovereignty, the key thing here is that customers need to be aware of what data is classified under data sovereignty laws. Not everything needs to be kept on private cloud. It’s only critical information, like for example private customer information like dates of birth, identity card numbers and the like that are specifically under the mandate of data sovereignty laws. The challenge here is that customers have to sort out just what data remains on the private cloud and what data can be pushed to the public cloud, though both are equally secure.” For more information on Oracle swing by www.oracle.com