Oracle has announced it will in some instances help organizations move on-premises Oracle workloads into its public cloud at no additional cost. The Oracle Cloud Lift Services initiative provides access to Oracle engineers that are specifically trained to migrate both applications and databases on to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service, says Vinay Kumar, senior vice president for OCI.
IT organizations that are looking to move large numbers of workloads all at once to OCI will still have to either contract a global systems integrator or do it themselves, adds Kumar. However, Oracle has identified a swath of customers that have a small number of workloads they would not otherwise move the cloud without some free assistance, notes Kumar. “We want to remove a barrier,” he adds.
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Making Cloud Migration Easier
IT teams have, one way or another, been migrating workloads to the cloud for the better part of a decade and yet the bulk of most application workloads continue to run in on-premises IT environments. It’s not clear to what degree free migration services might accelerate those efforts but Oracle does have a vested interest in making sure as many workloads move onto its cloud versus rival services from, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, or Google.
The issue internal IT teams face is it takes time and effort to master the tools and processes employed to migrate application workloads to the cloud. Most of them, however, are only going to use those tools and processes a handful of times before a migration is completed. Investing in a capability that is regularly required doesn’t make much financial sense. However, the cost of employing a professional services firm to manage that task can also be considerable. From an internal IT perspective, the path of least economic resistance is often to simply continue to run a workload where it is.
That presents a quandary for cloud service providers as they compete to get as many workloads as possible running on their respective clouds. The more workloads they have running on their cloud the more economically efficient they become. It’s that economic efficiency that enables them to profitably cut prices for compute and other services. A cloud service provider that doesn’t have enough workloads compared to their rivals will eventually find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
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Improving Cloud Economics
Cloud service providers are obviously well aware of cloud economics. Long term, it’s in their best interest to make it as easy to run as many workloads as possible on their platform. IT leaders should be able to leverage that issue to induce cloud service providers to absorb more of the cost of an application migration.
Naturally, smaller cloud service providers that are trying to gain market share at the expense of AWS and Microsoft are going to be a little more inclined to absorb those costs. However, once AWS and Microsoft become cognizant of what’s required for them to remain competitive it’s probable they too will absorb more of the cost of a migration.
Regardless of which cloud service provider ultimately funds an application migration it’s always worth remembering just how desperate for business any potential supplier really is.
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