Transitional cloud services and offerings are helping companies to change their business information technology (IT) and hardware gradually, allowing them to familiarise themselves with the new business objectives of responsiveness, adaptability and data stewardship, says Oracle Africa cloud infrastructure sales leader Shane Fernandes.

Using the cloud is a long-term objective of most businesses, but the transition is challenging and businesses require an intermediate step. The Oracle on-premise cloud solutions provide the same experience and capabilities as cloud service providers do, as a transitional step on a client’s site.

The solution enables companies to immediately begin using cloud systems and this helps them to reform their business processes gradually and integrate into modern business systems and services consumption models, including cloud services.

“Customers can migrate their applications and workflows to cloud service providers when they deem it suitable to move them off-site,” says Fernandes.

There are many companies in Africa, including major banks, that have deployed mission-critical applications, data and workloads on cloud platforms and reduced their cost and IT hardware footprint, which demonstrates the economic fundamentals and suitability of cloud systems for large-scale commercial operations.

Further, the company’s on-premise cloud solutions can be deployed in branch environments. The same capabilities afforded by the full-stack systems deployed at headquarters can be supplied to branches by placing smaller hardware modules in the branch offices, he elaborates.

The company also provides services for clients through these on-premise cloud systems, as it does for clients in public cloud computing and those using cloud service providers.

Oracle’s expertise lies in data warehousing, data management, database modelling and data analytics, which are some of the key tools that companies require as cloud services and computing models proliferate, emphasises Fernandes.

“The Oracle cloud on-premise solutions are designed to protect clients’ investments. The engineered systems facilitate a steady and controlled migration to cloud platforms, and can be integrated into the preferred cloud strategy of the client,” he says.

Oracle’s expertise and experience in data stewardship, management and security underpin these cloud systems and protect the movement of data and workloads between platforms.

“However, customers must have data- science skills to exploit the data effectively and draw intelligence from it. This remains a key in-house requirement, which also holds true regardless of the IT use models, whether legacy or cloud.”

“Services on demand and everything-as-a-service have replaced inflexible hardware and software cycles and have reduced the costs that businesses pay for their services. Oracle’s on-premise systems are designed to optimise a client’s on-site resources and reduce their IT equipment footprint and costs,” concludes Fernandes.