Nancy Swanson, Senior Director of Product Marketing for the Oracle Database Appliance Portfolio, wrote about how companies can move to a new stage of competitiveness and growth when they leverage IaaS to transform their organizations on-premises or in the Cloud.

An increasing number of businesses are discovering that infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a catalyst for digital transformation, accelerated application development, and increased customer engagement through mobile applications and social interactions. Gartner forecasts that IaaS spending will grow 27.6 percent and reach nearly $40 billion in 2019. That would be a nearly $10 billion increase from last year.

Business Drivers Behind IaaS

There are several major business drivers behind this period of rapid IaaS adoption, including:

• Reduced cost and reliance on on-premises corporate data centers
• Immediate availability of infrastructure and dynamic changes to capacity
• Reduced time to deploy new functionalities and go to market
• More robust and highly available solutions
• Minimized risk and business disruption while transitioning workloads to the Cloud
• Leveraged security expertise of the provider
• Access to lines of business (LOB) to procure and provision resources, IaaS consoles, and APIs based on business needs while IT simply monitors activity

Availability of on-demand processing power, storage, and bandwidth has paved the way for companies to take a Cloud-native, or IaaS-first, approach for all workloads. Companies are using Cloud to create business models that were not previously possible and drive change in how traditional industries operate.

Small- and medium-sized businesses, companies with more security concerns that want to migrate to IaaS Cloud, and business where the current technology stack is in an Oracle on-premises environment are areas where significant IaaS usually occurs. Insurance and utilities sectors are standout industries adopting IaaS.

Scenarios Where IaaS Makes Sense

Adopting IaaS can be helpful in several scenarios, including:

• When a hardware refresh of existing infrastructure is due
• When you are setting up a new application environment
• When you are looking to reduce your operating expense bills from other Cloud vendors
• When your business periodically imposes higher workloads and you need an elastic infrastructure

When a Hardware Refresh Is Due

If your organization is looking at modernizing or upgrading its infrastructure instead of heavily investing in new hardware that is hard to maintain, it makes sense to adopt IaaS. However, it’s important to note that enterprises don’t have to or need to move everything over at once. Keeping some infrastructure on-premises could even be a strategic move.

With all of the infrastructure co-engineered to optimize both performance and security, Oracle Cloud provides a secure environment and seamless performance between on-premises and the Cloud.

When Setting Up a New Application Environment

If you are setting up a new application environment (Dev, Test, Production, and DR), it’s a great time to start on IaaS Cloud. Oracle IaaS Cloud delivers a complete set of services based on open source technologies for orchestration, scheduling, management, operation, and analytics for your applications. Meanwhile, other database-intensive processing can remain on-premises to optimize the performance of all workloads.

When Looking to Reduce Bills

Moving to Oracle Cloud could provide you with significant discounts on licensing and service costs. Oracle Cloud offers bare metal infrastructure and virtualization for all workloads. It could help reduce operating costs by as much as 50 percent.

On the other hand, Oracle Cloud-Ready Infrastructure, including Engineered Systems and Cloud at Customer, provide cost-saving options for organizations with workloads that must remain on-premises by consolidating databases and applications onto a single-vendor stack of purpose-built, highly performant, highly available systems.

When in Need of an Elastic Infrastructure

If your organization experiences peak workload times when you need extra capacity to avoid performance degradation, Oracle IaaS Cloud could be a great solution for you. It allows you to add capacity as needed and then ratchet back down when it’s no longer needed. As a subscription-based service, you only pay for the capacity that you use—eliminating the need to have additional, costly on-premises hardware standing idle.

With Oracle Engineered Solutions, stranded capacity is not an issue for customers with workloads that must remain on-premises. Combining Engineered Systems and bursting to the Cloud allows you to leverage the performance and security benefits of on-premises infrastructure while accommodating for any spikes in usage.

Methods for Moving to Oracle Cloud

Oracle offers three unique ways to consume the Cloud:

1. On-premises Engineered Systems with Cloud equivalents for an effective hybrid Cloud solution
2. Cloud at Customer with the availability to run a self-contained instance of Oracle Public Cloud in your data center behind your firewall
3. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI or IaaS)

All three of these options are enterprise-grade and built from the ground up for the Oracle Database. Oracle Database can run all of your workloads equally well, whether they are traditional multi-tiered enterprise applications, high-performance workloads, or modern serverless and container-based architectures. Security is built in and integrated—eliminating gaps at any layer. It also provides secure access, control of your Cloud resources, and visibility at scale.

What You Can Do with Oracle Cloud

With Oracle Cloud, you can:

• Reduce your operating expense costs
• Eliminate manual application management with autonomous functionality
• Reduce licensing costs and get BYOL mobility
• Scale as needed to support business expansion

Reduce OpEx Costs

Since IaaS is a subscription model, it can reduce costs by moving away from costly capital investments and on-premises management. You only have to pay for the capacity that you use, and you can add or reduce capacity as needed to meet the demand for ultimate elasticity.

Eliminate Manual Application Management

With Oracle IaaS Cloud, applications can be managed completely autonomously—removing all human intervention. This eliminates manual time spent monitoring systems and diagnosing problems and removes the risk of human error.

Reduce Licensing Costs

In addition to reducing licensing costs by an average of 30 percent, Oracle also offers “bring your own license” (BYOL). This gives you complete license mobility as you move from on-premises to Oracle Cloud or if you choose to have your Oracle Cloud in your own data center with the Cloud at Customer option. You can bring your on-premises license entitlement and get license support using your existing support contract.

Scale as Needed

Since infrastructure is offered as a service, you can add capacity as your business expands. It provides easy and unlimited scalability. Since on-premises and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is co-engineered and Cloud-ready, your on-premises infrastructure can be moved to the Cloud seamlessly whenever you’re ready. You can scale without investments in new hardware and software.

For more information about how to leverage IaaS and Oracle Cloud to grow and transform your organization, either on-premises or in the Cloud, check out Nancy’s blog and additional Quest resources attached below.