Be it supply chain disruptions, the work-from-home trend, or consumers’ increased preference for online services, the changes brought about the pandemic have forced organisations to take digital transformation more seriously. They are now faced with compressed transformation, wherein they need to modernise their IT infrastructure and tools in a short time to gain business agility.
According to industry leaders who spoke at the Oracle Executive Leadership Forum on November 9, cloud is instrumental in an era of compressed transformation.
“Organisations today cannot afford to stand still or wait around. They have to innovate at speed and scale to address changes like the new way of work – and cloud provides a fabric for businesses to do so effectively,” says Garrett Ilg, president for Asia Pacific & Japan at tech giant Oracle.
Using the analogy of food to explain the value of cloud, Anoop Sagoo, chief operating officer at global professional services company Accenture, likens cloud to a food base that enhances the flavour of the other ingredients in a dish.
“Cloud allows businesses to build a digital core and connect software together so that they can use other technologies like artificial intelligence(AI) to leverage the power of data for innovation and growth. Recognising this, organisations are moving their apps and data to the cloud (i.e. re-platforming) to effectively re-build their business and address new demands,” he adds.
Thai wholesale retailer Siam Makro is one organisation that has embarked on its cloud journey. Its group chief information officer Paul Howe shares that the move – including the use of cloud applications like Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) – has enabled the company to scale, minimise downtime, better manage complex workloads, and develop new solutions quickly without sacrificing security.
“We have thousands of users, internally and from our suppliers, concurrently accessing our systems at any time. So we needed a really robust system that can handle complex workloads and respond quickly to users while ensuring data security – and ADW delivered all that,” he says.
Key considerations when moving to the cloud
To fully benefit from cloud, organisations need to adopt cloud purposefully and have a plan for it. Else, they risk facing implementation issues or cloud management headaches.
David Tay, chief information officer at Singapore-headquartered precision manufacturer Beyonics, shares the steps organisations can take as they embrace cloud-based technologies.
Firstly, organisations should define their business transformation goals. This ensures they stay focused on the business and what needs to be done, and not the technology and digitisation itself.
Secondly, they have to review their business and operational processes. They should ask their employees and management on their pain points and needs, as well as identify the shortfalls of the existing business applications and tools. Doing so will solve ‘real-world problems’ and help employees to accept the need to move from legacy to cloud applications.
Finally, they need to find the right partner that can provide the technologies and support they require. Business transformation is a journey and organisations need a partner who is there for the long haul.
Tay says: “Digitalisation is key today, but those are not Beyonics’ core competency. So we decided to work with a strategic partner who understands our business and pain points, and can help us implement the right technologies and processes, and ensure right skills training and knowledge transfer.”
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He also highlights the need for organisations to have an open and honest relationship with their tech partners. “They need to inform each other what works and what doesn't in a direct and respectful way, to ensure the success of transformation efforts.”
OCI as the fabric of business success
To cement its position as a strategic partner that helps organisations extract the full value of cloud, Oracle recently launched the Oracle Cloud Singapore region. It will support the growing demand for enterprise cloud services in Southeast Asia, and expand Oracle’s reach to 34 cloud regions across 17 countries globally.
Oracle Cloud Singapore Region was launched at the Oracle Executive Leadership Forum on November 9
“With this new Singapore region, organisations in Southeast Asia can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run their businesses better. Besides providing a cloud infrastructure, OCI also offers an integrated suite of enterprise cloud applications and built-in security. As such, organisations can take a holistic approach to modernising their business and services with OCI,” explains Jae Evans, Oracle’s chief information officer.
She continues: “We’re seeing more businesses pivoting to Oracle because of the high performance, built-in security, and low cost of OCI – all of which help improve their speed of innovation.”
Here are the key benefits of OCI, which can set businesses up for continued success in a cloud-first world:
- Helps meet business needs regardless of the chosen cloud strategy
Designed to be multi-purpose, OCI can meet organisations’ needs regardless of their cloud strategy. “OCI can help businesses lift-and-shift workloads and then improve and expand to get better benefits of our cloud. It can also help fully refactor workloads and enable them to leverage native toolsets directly on OCI,” says Evans. Organisations can therefore gain the benefits of cloud no matter where they are in their modernisation plans by using OCI.
Moreover, organisations of all sizes can turn to OCI for a comprehensive suite of enterprise cloud applications. Evans shares that OCI offers more than 60 industry applications, including those for financial services and retail. It also provides a full set of native services, developer services and tools, and advanced data services like data science and AI. “This whole plethora of services that we offer across the full stack enables businesses to run native applications, as well as migrate applications and modernise them onto our cloud,” she claims. - Supports hybrid and multicloud
Complex workloads require a variety of hybrid and multicloud deployment choices. As such, OCI supports both hybrid and multicloud to enable organisations to keep data and services where they need it.
Businesses can deploy Oracle Cloud completely within their own data centres with Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud @Customer deploy cloud services remotely on the edge with Roving Edge Infrastructure, or across a multicloud environment between OCI and Microsoft Azure. This gives government and enterprise users a broad but consistent set of options to address all workload requirements. - Addresses data sovereignty and latency issues
With Oracle Cloud Singapore region, organisations in Southeast Asia can be assured their data used on OCI stays in the region by default. “This allows organisations to move to the cloud and benefit from it while satisfying any requirements to keep their data and applications local, which is important especially for regulated and government organisations,” says Evans.
She adds: “The Singapore region also means we can provide low latency, high throughput connections to Southeast Asian organisations through OCI FastConnect to enable them to run their applications and data in a performant manner.”
Available via a direct connection or through partners, FastConnect provides an easy, elastic, and economical way to create a dedicated private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance versus public Internet-based connections. - Provides high availability and disaster protection
OCI’s next-generation architecture provides a high-performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design maximises performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud Region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centres for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures.
To help customers plan data centre deployments to meet application requirements and optimise their cloud infrastructure, OCI provides a no cost inter-region latency dashboard that provides insights into real-time and historical latency for Oracle Cloud Regions around the globe. - Helps to realise more sustainable businesses
Collective efforts are necessary to solve sustainability issues. Oracle has therefore pledged to power Oracle Cloud Regions globally with 100% renewable energy by 2025 to help its customers become sustainable businesses. Every cloud region will use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimise their environmental impact.
As part of its renewable energy clean cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6% of its retired hardware in FY21 while strictly adhering to its data privacy and security practices.
Committed to driving cloud adoption
To get more Singapore businesses to use cloud to drive innovation, Oracle is providing 100 start-ups US$30,000 each in Oracle Cloud credits over the next two years. It is also offering free OCI training and certifications until March 31, 2022, to make it easier for local companies to acquire or develop the skilled professionals they need to aid business growth.
Additionally, Oracle will continue working with partners like Accenture and Intel to accelerate organisations’ cloud adoption to become agile, intelligent, and digital businesses.
Besides that, Oracle plans to open more cloud regions in new locations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Latin America over the next year. It plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022 to address the increasing customer demand for OCI worldwide.
Learn more about the newest developments in cloud and the new possibilities they create for the advancement of sustainable and resilient communities at the ASEAN Cloud Connect 2021 event on 17 November 2021. Register to attend here: https://bit.ly/3v6NpPz
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