Critical Cloud Capabilities for the Enterprise CLOUD CAPABILITIES FOR ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS Top cloud requirements for midsize and large enterprises (source: Computerworld Strategic

Critical Cloud Capabilities for the Enterprise Responding to Customer Demands O R A C L E W H I T E P A P E R | J U L Y 2 0 1 5

CRITICAL CLOUD CAPABILITIES FOR ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS

Executive Summary What do IT executives look for in cloud service and platform providers? Which capabilities, technologies, and services are most important? How do organizations prioritize performance, management, interoperability, and migration as they consider new cloud implementations? To answer these and other pressing questions, Computerworld worked with Triangle Publishing Services to conduct a global survey of IT professionals in midsize to large enterprises that have experience with public and private clouds. The researchers received feedback from more than 300 IT leaders and practitioners including executives, developers, and architects, throughout North America, Europe, and Asia in a variety of industries. The consensus was clear: Cloud computing is now broadly accepted as an economical way to share a pool of configurable computing resources. 87 percent of the businesses that participated in the study said that they look to cloud initiatives to lower capital expenses, and 84 percent of them to reduce operational expenses. Improving business agility and making better use of IT resources were equally important. A desire to achieve these results is driving steady growth in cloud workloads. The respondents offered candid feedback on many other business issues and IT issues. What are the key considerations associated with using public and private cloud technologies? Which cloud models are popular for various business workloads? Is the cloud ready to support mission-critical applications? Can organizations effectively integrate applications, data, and services between public and private cloud environments? Do today’s cloud offerings satisfy the rigorous requirements that characterize on-premises data centers? These were some of the questions that the researchers set out to answer. In the remainder of this paper, we will drill into the details of this research as we identify best practices for cloud initiatives. We will examine the challenges that today’s IT professionals face and discover the solutions that Oracle offers to help customers drive successful cloud projects. As we will see, developers, line of business (LoB) managers, and operations personnel all have a role to play in these initiatives.

Growth in the Public Cloud Public cloud services are distributed systems hosted and managed by a cloud vendor. In the next two years, a growing number of companies plan to move key parts of their computing workloads to public clouds to take advantage of rapid implementation options, dynamic scalability, and subscription-based pricing models. These cloud customers demand enterprise caliber capabilities that mimic the security, performance, and scalability of their on-premises systems. For example, 83 percent of IT leaders that participated in the Computerworld-Triangle Publishing survey said they want assurance that their cloud-based assets will be isolated from other customer assets in a multitenant environment. Approximately 80 percent of the customers want to see service level guarantees, integrated identity management software, disaster recovery, and ease of integration between cloud and on premises assets. Motivating factors among approximately 75 percent of the people surveyed include a desire for lifecycle management tools, portability of vendor licenses, and the ability to measure cloud resource use. Many of these organizations are considering Oracle Cloud Services, are a broad collection of offerings that includes Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted, and supported by Oracle. According to the industry professionals that Computerworld surveyed, this type of versatile technology offering is becoming progressively more attractive: 84 percent of the people who responded said they are implementing clouds today or plan to do so within two years.

Customer Requirement #1: Service Level Guarantees and Business Continuity Maximum availability and business continuity are top requirements for public cloud deployments. 82 percent of the respondents to the Computerworld/Triangle Publishing survey stated that service level guarantees are important to their cloud initiatives. The only requirement that ranked higher was multitenancy: 83 percent of the respondents said they insist on complete isolation from other tenant environments.


Top cloud requirements for midsize and large enterprises (source: Computerworld Strategic Marketing Services). Oracle meets these customer service level requirements with enterprise-class availability, scalability, and performance in Oracle’s secure, multitenant public cloud. It is already being used by thousands of organizations around the world.

Customer Requirement #2: Efficient Development Platform Many organizations have distributed development teams. In some cases they have combined development and operations functions (DevOps) to bring applications to market more quickly. These organizations require tools that improve developer agility and quality. It’s no wonder application development is one of the most popular use cases for public clouds—and it is growing fast, from 34 percent of respondents in 2014 to an expected 43 percent in 2016 (see figure).


Top cloud requirements for midsize and large enterprises (source: Computerworld Strategic Marketing Services).

A Turnkey Platform for Cloud Development Oracle has a rich set of development tools that are now available in the cloud. These tools support many different development scenarios, such as creating high-performance cloud apps, rapidly developing mobile apps, and enriching SaaS apps with new functionality. A comprehensive offering of application development and integration PaaS services in the Oracle Cloud Platform enables IT to more easily streamline the development, testing, deployment, and integration of new business applications.


As cloud-based application development and testing grows in importance, Oracle’s portfolio of PaaS solutions enables customers to easily move their workloads into a cloud environment. The Oracle offering includes:

• Oracle Database Cloud Service to manage data and build databases • Oracle Java Cloud Service to develop, test, deploy, and manage Java applications • Oracle Mobile Cloud Service to construct cross-platform native and HTML5 applications for smartphones

and tablets • Oracle Developer Cloud Service to simplify development across the entire lifecycle

These Oracle application development services minimize complexity and reduce overhead by encouraging the use of familiar languages and tools. This turnkey development platform, securely hosted in the cloud, permits “one-click” deployment to Oracle Public Cloud or a private cloud infrastructure.

Customer Requirement #3: Integration Cloud integration is growing quickly in importance: the Computerworld/Triangle Publishing survey research revealed an 11 percent increase in interest in technologies for cloud integration over the previous year. Organizations need to avoid rigid point-to-point connections between cloud-based services and on-premises infrastructure, which often ignore well-established integration principles. Custom interfaces among cloud apps are difficult to maintain and tricky to upgrade when endpoints change. When it comes to enterprise applications and systems of record, synchronization between on-premises and cloud-based apps must be orchestrated in a consistent way. Industry experts often cite integration as one of the barriers to adoption of cloud services, especially for apps that need to exchange messages and data. Customers want a simple yet powerful cloud integration platform that includes out-of-the-box adaptors for Oracle Apps as well as for third-party cloud apps like Workday, NetSuite, and Salesforce. Oracle offers a simple yet powerful integration platform to connect private cloud apps and third-party SaaS apps to Oracle Cloud services via out-of-the-box connectors. For example, to speed time-to-value, Oracle Integration Cloud Service is pre-integrated with Oracle SaaS applications such as HCM, ERP, CX, and SCM. It offers best-in-class SaaS connectors to accelerate integration with other cloud assets. A standards-based software development kit (SDK) and library of pre-built, customizable connectors simplify integration chores. The intuitive, browser-based system can be run on a computer or tablet. It features video tutorials to help developers gain proficiency. A visual dashboard makes it easy to monitor integrations.

Customer Requirement #4: Unified Management Between Public and Private Clouds According to the Computerworld/Triangle Publishing survey, 76 percent of respondents want unified application lifecycle tools to develop, deploy, and manage public and private clouds in a unified way (see Figure).


(Source: Computerworld Strategic Marketing Services) With the Oracle Cloud, organizations can leverage the same development lifecycle management tools they use on premises. Oracle Developer Cloud Service has built-in utilities for source control, issue tracking, and documentation. Organizations using Oracle Developer Cloud Service receive a turnkey development platform securely hosted in the cloud with integrated tools to manage and track tasks, builds, and documentation. This allows them to:

• Create hosted GIT repositories to manage project source files • Use Maven repositories to manage libraries • Integrate existing repositories in GitHub • Leverage Hudson as a continuous integration tool

Once deployed, organizations can then use Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c for lifecycle management for both their private cloud and public cloud assets. Oracle Enterprise Manager includes tools for self-service provisioning and monitoring of all SaaS and PaaS services with integrated chargeback and capacity planning. It provides complete visibility into both the physical and virtual cloud environments, from applications to disk. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, organizations can easily plan, monitor, and manage resource capacity—all from within a unified management console. For example, cloud administrators can create zones, identify pooled resources, configure role-based access to those resources, and define service catalogs and chargeback plans. Users can request cloud services and scale them up and down in response to changes in the workload. Oracle Enterprise Manager keeps both users and administrators apprised of the costs of the services delivered and establishes accountability for consumption of resources. A graphical user interface shows the entire topology of the services being offered, so administrators can monitor the performance and quickly address any issues before they impact business users.

Customer Requirement #5: Mobility Of course, many of these new apps are mobile, which has motivated the survey respondents (9 percent more respondents this year than last) to check out enterprise Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) solutions such as Oracle Mobile Cloud Service. This platform enables developers to create, deploy, and manage mobile applications that are easy to connect to backend systems. They can extend applications by publishing these services to a mobile API catalog. Mobile Cloud Service also includes common services such as data storage, sync, push-notification, security, and user management. Built in analytics make it easy to monitor and manage application use to improve future revisions. Oracle Mobile Cloud Service derives essential functionality from the cloud, freeing developers to focus on front-end development tasks without getting bogged down in enterprise security, integration, API management, and other IT


issues. They can focus on the front end of the applications, using their chosen mobile client development tools to build apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, and other mobile platforms. They can also utilize mobile-ready APIs exposed in the cloud and enjoy a unified platform that includes standard backend services for push notifications, integration with social networks, user management, cloud storage, and many other common functions. Security is maintained at all critical points, including authentication at the device level and security of “data in motion” between the device and the enterprise.

Customer Requirement #6: Interoperability and Deployment Flexibility Cloud data and functions often must be shared with on-premise information systems. Similarly, private clouds that depend on local data often need to feed that data to cloud-based applications, or trigger events through the firewall as part of a multi-step workflow spanning on-premises and cloud applications. As customers embark on these projects they need the assurance of strong interoperability among private and public clouds. They want to be able to easily port applications with no code changes and also utilize a unified set of tools for development, deployment, and management throughout the application lifecycle. According to the Computerworld’s research, this universality is essential: 80 percent of respondents want standards-based platforms such as OpenStack, Java, and SQL on both public and private clouds, 79 percent want business process and data integration to span public and private clouds, 78 percent want ease of application portability—from private clouds to public clouds and back again, with no code changes, and 76 percent of respondents want unified application lifecycle tools to develop, deploy, and manage cloud applications. Oracle has spent many years creating a unified, standards-based platform that encourages interoperability among public cloud offerings and private clouds housed in traditional datacenters. Furthermore, customers seeking transparent workload portability across public and private clouds can initiate Dev/Test activities in the public cloud and then migrate them to a private cloud, and vice versa, leveraging Oracle. Having a unified set of services for application development, deployment, management, security, and mobility simplifies these transitions and provides true deployment flexibility.

Customer Requirement #7: Business Process Management Whether it’s taking orders, onboarding employees, closing the books, or interacting with customers, just about everything we do in business involves a process. Oracle Process Cloud Service allows organizations to rapidly design, automate, and manage these business processes in the cloud. The solution enables users to compose processes and collaboratively build applications in a code-free, web-based environment. Real time dashboards enable LoB users to monitor these processes, while built in task-management functions let them view, assign, and delegate tasks as part of an integrated workflow. It’s all part of a highly available and scalable application deployment environment that is created, secured, and managed in the cloud.


Customer Requirement #8: Collaboration Today’s distributed workforce needs efficient tools for sharing files—both inside and outside the firewall. Careless habits for exchanging content can expose an organization to security and compliance issues. These activities can also cause system management headaches as content proliferates outside of the organization’s established systems of record. That’s why 9 percent more respondents plan to investigate file sync and share solutions over the next year versus last year. Of particular importance is the ability to integrate cloud-based document sharing and collaboration solutions with existing content management systems. Oracle Documents Cloud Service is built for these organizations, with robust security and easy integration with on-premises Enterprise Content Management systems. Oracle empowers users to securely share content with each other as well as to sync it between their desktops and mobile devices. This robust and configurable cloud service simplifies document sharing while upholding the information management policies of the IT department.

Customer Requirement #9: Identity Management As cloud computing services become more widespread and diverse, authorizing people to use enterprise apps becomes progressively more challenging. How do you handle identity administration, authentication, trust management, access control, directory services, and governance for a roving workforce that expects a consistent experience, whether they use an iPad at a coffee shop or boot up a computer in the office? Oracle Identity Management provides a cohesive way to apply identity to applications and cloud-based services—something that is important to 79 percent of the people who expressed interest in a public PaaS. This inherent interoperability simplifies access for the users of those applications, no matter where the applications are hosted or what types of devices they use to access them. One identity can be associated with all enterprise assets, enabling centralized access-control and provisioning of user accounts across all the applications and cloud-based services.

Customer Requirement #10: Database Integration Many organizations are drawn to cloud-based database services because they make it easy to deliver functionality to many users and multiple divisions from the same hardware and software infrastructure. Provisioning new databases in traditional environments can take days or weeks. A database as a service (DBaaS) environment can compress that down to minutes, ensuring greater agility for the business with less risk and lower costs. Oracle Database Cloud Services gives you the power and flexibility of the Oracle Database in the cloud. You choose whether you want a dedicated database instance with direct network connections and full administrative control, or a dedicated schema with a full development and deployment platform managed by Oracle. Tight integration between Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database simplifies exchanges between cloud apps and on-premise databases—a requirement that was of importance to 79 percent of the people surveyed by Computerworld and Triangle Publishing. Oracle includes a complete set of middleware services with this PaaS offering, including the following key modules:

• Oracle Coherence, an in-memory data grid that improves the reliability, scalability, and performance of relational database management systems

• Oracle GoldenGate for real-time integration and replication of data between public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises systems

Growth in Private Clouds Private clouds consolidate servers, storage, operating systems, databases, and mixed workloads onto a shared hardware and software infrastructure. According to the Computerworld research cited previously, in the next two years respondents expect that 47 percent of computing workloads will run on these private clouds (up from 35 percent today). In addition, 72 percent of respondents expect to utilize a private cloud strategy in the next five years. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the fastest growing private cloud segment, a market that is expected to reach $9.1 billion by 2015.1 89 percent of respondents are drawn to PaaS offerings to achieve greater business agility; 88 percent believe that PaaS deployments will result in better use of IT resources; 87 percent cite more rapid

1 IDC, “Worldwide Competitive Public Platform as a Service 2013 – 2017 Forecast,” November 7, 2013.


implementation of business models and lower capital expenses; and 81 percent believe they will have fewer operational issues once their IT assets are managed in a PaaS environment.

(Source: Computerworld Strategic Marketing Services) With Oracle, no matter whether you deploy your apps on premises or in the cloud, your enterprise will have access to the same platform in your private or public cloud. With the same standards in both, it is extremely easy to migrate your workloads to the cloud or back on premises. Only Oracle gives you the tools to make this a reality now.

Leveraging the Java Standard According to the IT professionals surveyed, Java is the leading platform for cloud development due to its ubiquitous adoption, mature set of libraries, and active development community. The Computerworld research revealed that 66 percent of today’s cloud workloads are developed and deployed on Java. Commercial Java-based tools are the cloud platform of choice, both now and in two years.


Most of these developers are attracted to Java’s enduring promise of “write once, use anywhere.” Oracle has taken this promise a step further for Java cloud deployments: By using the same platform for on-premises infrastructure and Oracle Cloud infrastructure, customers can easily shift workloads between conventional WebLogic Server installations and Oracle Java Cloud Service installations (which use Oracle WebLogic Server in the cloud). With Oracle Cloud solutions, developers can also take advantage of Java SE 8 and Node.js technologies. Java 8 supports the trend of expanding business services in the cloud and contains many useful capabilities such as improved collections and annotations, simpler parallel programming models, and more efficient use of multi-core processors. Additionally, Java Mission Control and Java Flight Recorder continuously collect runtime information, simplifying incident analysis for cloud and on-premises development activities. Java 8’s Advanced Management Console (AMC) improves security and availability.

The Oracle Approach Oracle Cloud Platform accelerates the process of developing and deploying cloud-based business applications. This enterprise-caliber portfolio of PaaS services is based on Oracle’s industry-leading database and middleware offerings, including Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle addresses the needs of three primary audiences with its PaaS solutions:

• Developers rely on the Oracle PaaS environment because it ensures greater speed and agility for critical projects. For example, developers can use the combination of Oracle Developer Cloud Service and Oracle Java Cloud Service to build, test and deploy Java EE or Java SE apps in the cloud at a fraction of the cost and time that it takes to do this on premise or using an IaaS vendor such as Amazon.

• IT Operations personnel rely on Oracle PaaS as a way to standardize development efforts throughout

the enterprise. These IT professionals are chartered with helping their organizations align new business initiatives with corporate goals. As they strive to enforce greater consistency for enterprise initiatives, they can leverage Oracle’s comprehensive PaaS solutions for both public and private cloud deployments. They can save time and maximize resources by utilizing the same Oracle PaaS services in both public and private cloud environments.

• Line of business (LoB) managers benefit from the Oracle PaaS offering because it enables their teams

to easily build, extend and integrate their cloud applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. For example, Oracle offers simple, intuitive cloud-based PaaS tools that can be utilized by non-developers. The Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service enables business users to create or extend business applications using a browser-based, visual development environment with no programming skills required. While Oracle Process Cloud Service allows business users to rapidly design, automate, and manage business processes with zero coding. And the Oracle Analytic Services allow line of business users to create and share interactive reports and dashboards in the cloud without having to wait for help from IT resources.


Oracle offers a complete platform for public and private clouds. Oracle Cloud Platform meets the unique needs of developers, IT professionals, and business users with a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of platform services that enables them to innovate faster, increase productivity, and lower costs. Oracle Cloud Platform enables enterprises to integrate existing IT services with next-generation cloud services, accelerate application development and deployment, and undertake business transformation initiatives.


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