For years, conventional IT thinking centered on the need to host custom applications in an on-premises setting. Custom apps, frequently built on application services such as Oracle WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, JBoss and IBM WebSphere, are now at the core of business. These apps may be unique to your environment and bristling with integrations to other core business apps and database. Even today, some organizations hesitate to deploy custom apps—often mission-critical systems designed to maximize business outcomes—outside of the on-premises world: The average enterprise has 464 custom applications, for everything from department use to enterprise-wide processes, and a large chunk of those are hosted in-house.
There are several reasons why some organizations remain hesitant to move their custom apps—often the lifeblood of their core business operations—to the cloud, including perceived issues around security, loss of centralized control and performance. But many things have happened to change that strategy, especially the development of powerful, secure, flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure. Today, some of the world’s most powerful, resilient, secure and responsive infrastructure is deployed and run in a cloud environment, optimizing the availability, safety and performance of custom apps.
Working with the right cloud infrastructure provider, one that also has experience with a wide range of software tools, applications and services, can provide many benefits to organizations. Those benefits include improved economic efficiencies compared with running custom applications in legacy on-premises data centers, as well as elimination of many of the associated IT management tasks.
Why Today’s Cloud Infrastructure Aligns Tightly With Custom App Requirements
Custom apps are designed for organizations’ unique requirements, many of which are either mission- or business-critical. That means applications must be always available, always secure and always performing at peak levels, even when user demand spikes unexpectedly. But they are often past their useful life, consuming network bandwidth and IT attention while possibly exposing security flaws and preventing the adoption of newer, more user-friendly technologies such as containers, microservices and IoT sensors.
As such, traditional data center deployments require expensive and inefficient over-provisioning of compute, storage and networking resources, as well as a great deal of manual work by IT staff that otherwise could be better applied to activities that more directly drive new business value. Additionally, many custom apps were developed years ago using older programming languages or other development tools that require specialized skills—skills that may no longer be available with in-house staff.
Moving custom apps to a cloud environment, by comparison, offers a range of key benefits, including easier, faster and more cost-efficient scalability as workloads evolve and shift with changing business demands. Working with the right cloud infrastructure partner also provides a stronger and more up-to-date security framework, using state-of-the-art security tools and services that already have been deployed and proven.
Since custom apps are developed, deployed and managed in a variety of ways, cloud infrastructure gives organizations the ability to choose the right strategy for them. For instance, they may choose to lift and shift applications as is, refactor and optimize those applications with code updates and new features, extend and modernize the applications with new interfaces, or build entirely new cloud-native applications using containers and microservices.
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Download NowHow Oracle Helps Organizations Move Custom Apps to Cloud Infrastructure
As both an experienced cloud service provider and a proven leader in custom applications, databases and hardware infrastructure, Oracle brings a unique combination of skills, technologies and services. Oracle offers a wide variety of advantages, such as the ability to migrate your custom apps as is, migrate them in days instead of months, and run applications faster and less expensively.
Whether your goal is to move, optimize or extend your custom applications, Oracle has the necessary technologies and expertise to help your organization get more from its custom applications in a cloud environment. Oracle also provides the flexibility to build and manage the right cloud environment for each unique need. For example, organizations can host the apps on Oracle infrastructure, powered by IntelÒ XeonÒ third-generation processors; build and manage a hybrid environment that allows custom workloads to run either on premises or in the cloud; or deploy in an on-premises private cloud environment.
Oracle Cloud Lift Services is a comprehensive cloud solution that includes infrastructure, software, processes and people to help ease the biggest pain points of cloud adoption. With Cloud Lift, customers access technical tools and cloud engineering resources to quickly migrate custom apps at no additional cost. Organizations can take advantage of having a single point of contact for all technical delivery and remove critical barriers for adoption of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, speeding time to value and creating opportunities to innovate without any downtime or disruptions.
Oracle Cloud@Customer product family brings Oracle’s public cloud services to customer data center, making it easier and more cost efficient for organizations to run mission-critical applications and databases on premises but in a cloud environment. Oracle brings in its own cloud infrastructure, sets it up, tests and provide cloud platform services for your custom apps and, as appropriate, helps you manage those applications. This not only frees up invaluable Capex that could be used for other purposes, but it also leverages the skills of Oracle’s team to manage the underlying platform for performance, security and availability.
For more information on how to optimize the value of custom applications by moving them to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, please click here.
