Move to the cloud to build a better business, not more servers
Many businesses contemplating a move to the cloud are focused on the efficiency and cost-saving of running on cloud compared to building servers on premise. But there’s a lot more to operating your business in the cloud than meets the eye. Moving to the cloud is not about taking software and servers that you ran on premise and simply running them in an abstract datacenter over the internet. It is about taking advantage of the opportunity to change the way you work and build a culture of innovation to drive greater value and growth.
Running your business in the cloud will allow your talented personnel to focus on activities that add value and fuel competitive differentiation — for example, developing new and enhanced business capabilities, rather than tending to operational maintenance and security. Moreover, the cloud allows you to efficiently scale your business without bulking up unnecessarily. It provides the tools to automate infrastructure management and analytics to fuel better decision-making for competitive advantage and real-time operational decisions. Working with the right cloud solution providers, organizations can also use cloud native technology capabilities to address their continually changing business needs and enable new opportunities with greater agility.
But what does it mean for a business to take full advantage of the cloud? Let’s explore, for instance, how using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) can help you build a better business that dynamically scales for growth.
Autoscale dynamically
A high-performing cloud infrastructure allows businesses to scale operations up or down dynamically. This dynamic capability offered with OCI helps prevent failures during demand surges, bypassing the need to beef up servers to an extent that is generally wasteful except during times of extremely high demand.
Consider a utility company with 5 million customers. Typically, that company might field 10,000 to 20,000 customer requests per day. When a major storm strikes, though, the company might receive millions of customer contacts via three or four different digital and voice channels. The old solution to this problem was to build infrastructure capable of supporting millions of hits at once. But with a cloud that auto-scales dynamically, businesses can benefit from a flexible infrastructure that costs less during periods of less demand while still effectively handling high demand surges.
Combining Oracle Cloud technology with Accenture’s deep industry experience and functional knowledge can help clients address these constantly changing business needs. Accenture also offers services to help with the on-going support of the technology, leveraging Accenture’s assets, automation, and factory performance to further remove the operational burden and allow businesses to remain focused on what makes them grow.
Being on the cloud allows businesses to thoroughly test in non-production environments for possible high demand use cases to see if the infrastructure in place efficiently scales. OCI can scale to meet extremely high demand scenarios and help test, predict and model for them. This is not something on-premise servers and less sophisticated clouds can do well. OCI does this better than other cloud providers because it was architected for complex mission critical workloads from the beginning. This is evident in innovations such as:
· Off-box virtualization for complete instance isolation for higher security and performance.
· Non-blocking networks to match the capability and performance of on-premise networks.
· L2 network virtualization to natively support various clustering architectures.
· Custom security chips to enhance zero-trust security.
For businesses, this is the difference between delighting or disappointing customers, between establishing a reputation for superior performance or falling behind when their customers need them most.
Automate to innovate
The ability to scale dynamically frees up capacity to focus on addressing business challenges and opportunities instead of being focused on averting a failure. OCI offers automated capabilities that resolve technical performance issues and deliver timely alerts and solutions, sparing people mundane oversight tasks and turbocharging their power to innovate and generate growth.
For reliability, Oracle delivers 99.995 percent availability[1]. This is furthered by technologies such as Autonomous Database and Autonomous Linux so that businesses spend virtually no time applying patches or dealing with security issues because OCI takes care of itself. The upshot is a great deal of free time and technical power to build new products and drive growth. The only question is what you do with that new freedom.
This is where Oracle’s second generation of automation capacities comes into play. Unlike other cloud providers focused on infrastructure and not functionality, Oracle brings its depth of application and database experience to the cloud. This application experience is why OCI comes with plug-and-play, self-service functionality to help you make decisions, code and develop new solutions faster.
To understand how cloud-driven automation fuels innovation, consider a fairly recent business problem. With the sudden spread of COVID and the unique challenges it introduced, businesses needed to adjust very quickly and enable alternative channels for their customers to do business as well as submit information and claims.
In most cases, to build a new customer portal and enable the associated business processes to support it, a business will spend six to 12 months in design, development and testing. Given the wide array of platform tools offered through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the fact that applications running on OCI have direct access to use these tools, this project can be cut down to weeks.
Leveraging Oracle Integration Cloud, clients can stand up new portals and expose them to customers in days, not months. Leveraging Automation cloud, they can take workflows from the portals they just stood up and automate the business processes and data entry to enable fast processing of claims and documents to serve customers better. Leveraging Oracle Analytics Cloud, they can quickly analyze data from the portals and spot trends in usage and customer data. Because of the interoperability of these tools and the Oracle Platform, solutions to complex business challenges can be layered and addressed quickly and comprehensively without a need to ever leave the cloud.
Go beyond
The assumption that the cloud’s value is limited to infrastructure management is by no means limited to people who are only minimally familiar with cloud computing. On the contrary, many cloud providers focus on just that: cost savings, efficiency, and security. OCI is built differently and allows you to go beyond these traditional cloud benefits. Oracle has developed the technology based on decades of experience in database and application development.
Oracle’s application expertise is built into its cloud infrastructure. Accenture’s industry experience and functional know-how can help clients leverage OCI to not only improve their technology-based operations but also unlock the transformational growth potential that comes with moving to the cloud.
Ready to accelerate your ascent to greater value? Learn more here.
“This content is provided for general information purposes and is not intended to be used in place of consultation with our professional advisors. This document refers to marks owned by third parties. All such third-party marks are the property of their respective owners. No sponsorship, endorsement or approval of this content by the owners of such marks is intended, expressed or implied.”
Copyright © 2022 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture and its logo are registered trademarks of Accenture
