Automating Your Cloud Operations Model

Any organization moving to the cloud develops its own model of organizing people, processes and platforms to ensure that the cloud delivers on the promise of operational and economic improvements. But doing that without innovative, well-thought-out and tightly integrated automation—facilitated by artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics—makes success far more elusive than it should be. 

As many organizations have found out, putting in place the right cloud operations model takes planning, collaboration and the right technology. The cloud operations model must be able to perform consistently across time and run a wide range of workloads, especially as cloud-based and cloud-native workloads become increasingly complex and tightly integrated with an organization’s core workflows and business processes. Many organizations have found out the hard way that operational models that require more management by administrators will struggle and, in many cases, simply fail to achieve the desired goals because manual operations do not scale. 

At the same time, organizations are moving more of their workloads—including business-critical workloads—to the cloud. These workloads inevitably depend on high-performance database management systems that are currently running in on-premises environments, and moving the workloads—and adding to them in the cloud—requires careful planning to meet not only operational requirements, but also performance, security, data protection and data governance requirements. These functions must be designed into every corner of the cloud framework and database workloads in such a way that workloads can be scaled, updated and protected automatically, without relying on manual intervention. 

Relying on countless add-on services to link data from one service to another or to manage various aspects of cloud operations only makes administration more complex and reduces data security. Instead, automation must be built into the cloud from the start and must accommodate the inevitable growth not only of the data itself, but also of the demands of ever-expanding database workloads in the cloud.

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer takes database cloud automation to a whole new level, providing a fully managed, self-service database cloud that runs in the customer’s data center with pay-per-use pricing. It allows organizations to eliminate manual administration and increase security by automating database lifecycle management with machine learning algorithms. This helps drive database performance at scale, while also reducing costs and freeing up administrators to work on transformative projects rather than manual tasks.

For organizations that are not able to move all of their database workloads to a public cloud setting, Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer is an ideal solution to achieve the same level of automation in their own data centers. Customers can eliminate database management complexity, while instituting flexible lifecycle and operational policies that meet regulatory, residency and governance requirements.

Cloud database operations with Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer are greatly simplified because the environment is automatically tuned based on changing workloads, resource consumption is automatically scaled up and down to match current needs, and patching is automated to eliminate human error. Organizations benefit from a pay-per-use subscription model in their data centers, and IT teams have to manage only users, schemas and the data in the databases. They no longer have to manually manage the database infrastructure and can now create greater value for the business. 

The recently introduced Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M uses 3^rd Gen Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable Processors, enabling online scaling of database compute consumption and eliminating the need for customers to manage the hardware infrastructure. Intel Xeon processors benefit from decades of innovation for the most common workload requirements, supported by close partnerships and deep integrations with the world’s leading software and solution providers. 

Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer’s fully automated environment coupled with optimized hardware and pay-per-use subscription pricing allows organizations to run faster and more efficiently and reduce costs—all while taking advantage of the cloud experience in their data centers.

For more information on Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer, please click here.