Manage Your Journey to the Cloud

The Emergence of the Hybrid Cloud

At an ever accelerating pace, organizations are turning to the Cloud to attain the agility and scalability that
has eluded traditional on premise enterprise applications. As a result, IT Leaders are able to shift their focus
from the commodity work of provisioning and maintaining their development environments to the strategic
work of supporting and collaborating with the business, while Developers gain access to a standardized selfservice environment that facilitates greater innovation.
But while this clearly represents the future for enterprise technologies, many organizations are constrained in
their move to the Cloud; not because theyve failed to embrace the possibilities but because they are
hampered by legacy on premise ERP systems and by their first-generation cloud applications that are often
narrow in scope and not well integrated with other applications. As a result IT leaders often have no clear
path to the cloud and are unable to meet the demands from business. Meanwhile, Lines of Business leaders,
convinced that IT has been unresponsive to their needs, led the adoption of standalone, public cloud
applications (SaaS).
Breaking out of this cycle is an imperative for organizations
to achieve the innovative potential that the Cloud provides.
The emergence of Hybrid Cloud strategies provides the key
to unlocking this potential. For too long, we have
positioned cloud computing as a binary decision; in effect,
do I move to the cloud or not. With Hybrid architectures,
cloud computing is redefining itself to an interoperable and
dynamic network of public clouds, private clouds and on
premise systems. The Cloud has matured into an
operational enterprise technology platform. Or, as
Gartners Ed Anderson says, I start to think of a multi cloud
environment as a foundation for a next wave of
applications.
Oracle is now embracing a hybrid approach for its installed base, in which its customers will knit together
public and private clouds with their on premise apps and data centers, through its rapidly maturing PaaS
platform as their single set of interfaces:
Hybrid cloud is our foundation and focus. Enterprises and large enterprises say, look, we have tens of
years and millions of dollars of investment in on our on-premise environment. Ultimately, what is the
best solution? It will be hybrid.
Oracle Senior Vice President Steve Daheb, October 22, 2015
And, most telling was Larry Ellisons statement during his Open World 2015 kick off:
"On-premises computing is not going to vanish. Even if on-premises computing eventually becomes a
smaller piece of the pie than cloud computing, there's going to be a long period of transition.
Larry Ellison, OOW Kick off 10_25.
Organizations can now tailor their cloud platform to meet their particular needs, ensure scalability and
leverage past investments, all for the optimal benefit to the Business. Establishing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy is
now a critically important opportunity for enterprise leadership in order to define the future enterprise
technology state and create a roadmap to achieve it. This is the focus of Quests Managed Journey to the
Cloud Executive Series
All Rights Reserved 2015

Manage Your Journey to the Cloud

The Customer View
For too long, we have discussed enterprise cloud computing as a binary decision; in effect, do I move to the
cloud or not, when in fact it is not binary. It is situational and conditional. There are differences with each
organization that required a different discussion; one that focused upon the questions Where should I
move to the Cloud and how will it interoperate with what stays on premise?
With the commitment of Oracle to support a Hybrid approach for at least the next decade, its on premise
customers can map out a personalized cloud strategy. Oracle PaaS is maturing into a Services platform that
is competitive with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and offers some real advantages to Oracles on premise
customers. And the latest releases of Oracles ERP applications are increasingly designed for SaaS and PaaS
interoperability, enabling a hybrid approach that will allow organizations to approach their adoption of
cloud computing as a defined and sustained journey.
But there are many different paths in this Journey to the
Cloud. Organizations need to tailor their cloud platform
to meet their particular needs, ensure scalability and
leverage past investments, all for the optimal benefit to
the Business.
Establishing a hybrid cloud strategy in partnership with
lines of business is a critically important task for IT
leadership . This should be a collaborative process with
line-of-business counterparts, resulting in a shared vision
that is co-owned. This strategy needs to should align
closely with your overall business strategy and contain
quantifiable business results that you can track and
report on over time.
IT Leaders need to think broadly across multiple dimensions about the ways the cloud can impact their
organization. This includes top-line growth, cost savings, and risk mitigation. They must enumerate, quantify
and prioritize these areas of value. This will help sell the vision and justify the plan.
Finally, for all its benefits, the cloud is not a silver bullet. Organizations will still need to consider many of the
costs, roadblocks, and setbacks associated with new software projects, such as purchasing decision-making,
implementation time, lack of maturity of some offerings, implementation snafus and bugs, IT and user
training, and investment in controls for security and compliance.
Experience has shown that there are six imperatives of a successful cloud strategy.
1. Seamless interoperability across on premise applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS)
2. The ability to shift processes and data between public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise as

business conditions change

3. Day 1 value and a foundation for continuous innovation such as IoT, Enterprise Mobility and Big Data
4. The ability for Lines of Business to more quickly differentiate themselves from the competition.

5. The optimal balance of openness and security

6. Measurable impacts to cost, control and complexity

All Rights Reserved 2015