Cloud RAFT - Addressing the Challenges of Cloud Adoption

Today, cloud computing has progressed well beyond the hype stage of the hype cycle and has become a mature technology and an integral part of an enterprise’s IT strategy. According to research, the cloud migration services market has reached $119.13 billion in 2020. Moreover, a Gartner 2022 report indicates that 51% of enterprise IT expenses would shift from traditional solutions to the cloud by 2025, compared to 41% in 2022. However, cloud adoption trends remain limited to generic software applications for many organizations. Many enterprises are apprehensive about adopting the cloud for more complex and mission-critical applications such as ERP, core transactional applications, or enterprise-wide integration platforms.

Navigating adoption decisions

Deciding whether to invest further in on-premise hardware or switch to the cloud must depend on factors including the type of business, use cases, and infrastructure. When it comes to moving on from legacy infrastructure, much of the concern revolves around losing control over systems and processes, as well as accessibility, compliance and data security issues. Enterprises fear investing in new technology without adequate support and knowledge on managing customizations in the cloud or understanding the number of integrations required to the current system. The lack of definition of a cloud strategy is also an inhibiting factor.

Cloud adoption: making the switch

The benefits of cloud adoption have become more evident over time. There are numerous factors driving enterprises towards the cloud, such as the expensive resources deployed to maintain on-premise data centres, the costs of server hardware, and space and power consumption. The transition from on-premises to cloud adoption can be tricky and challenging. Still, with its flexibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness and fully agile nature, a cloud-competent enterprise can be worth the effort. The benefits of adopting cloud over on-premises data centres include:

• Reduced IT and energy costs

• High levels of security

• Easy data access from remote locations

• Quick deployment of cloud-based software

• Easy system updates

• Reduced risk of data loss

• Flexibility and scalability

Leveraging an end-to-end cloud adoption platform

A cloud adoption platform eases the transition process with tools and accelerators that streamlines workload migration and ensures business continuity with minimal downtime. It helps organizations to manage cloud environments with ease and modernize business processes and applications seamlessly. Zensar’s intelligent cloud adoption platform — Cloud RAFT(Rapid Action for cloud Transformation) — is a proprietary platform that provides end-to-end cloud services, spanning across strategy and assessment, SaaS implementation and rollouts, cloud migrations, managed services and integration services, and modern app development.

Assessment

Cloud RAFT is a unique, automated cloud migration assessment offering that reduces the traditional assessment timelines from 4 weeks to less than a week and provides actionable insights, comprehensive TCO calculations and an objective mapping score of clients’ EBS installations with regard to Oracle Cloud applications.

The Cloud RAFT assessment tool comprehensively and intuitively reads EBS installations, discovers the functionalities and customizations in use and provides a numeric fitment score that helps customers make an objective decision on their cloud migration decision.

The assessment tool provides a proprietary fitment index based on functionality usage, customizations and business volumes. It automates data collection and analysis while offering a reporting framework. It also reduces the cost by 90% while minimizing the overall time commitment.

Implementation

Cloud RAFT empowers customers with accelerators specially developed for Oracle Cloud implementations. This enables faster implementations with greater accuracy. With the insights gained over our extensive implementation experience, our experts have selected three key areas to automate the process: data migration, configuration migration, and testing.

Data migration: Zensar’s Oracle Cloud data migration tool provides automated process-driven data migration. At the same time, it also provides end-to-end visibility of the process, steps, checkpoints, and data reconciliation.

The data migration tool enables organizations to migrate multi-source data with standardized templates. This ensures that reconciling source financial data at the target system and handling large volumes of data becomes possible. The tool also ensures data security and reduces rework efforts by 40% with regard to manual conversion.

Configuration migration: Zensar’s setup replication tool provides end-to-end automation of the configurations from EBS to the first cloud ERP instance and subsequent cloud-to-cloud instance migrations.
The setup replication tool saves configuration and migration efforts by 20-30% and provides 100% accurate results.

Automated testing: Automated testing ensures comprehensive coverage of the cloud ERP processes and comprehensive reporting on test execution. It facilitates a 60-70% reduction in test script creation efforts and 80% savings in test execution efforts.

Migration — SOA Migrator

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) powers cloud computing. Businesses have made significant investments in on-premise SOA integrations. However, automated tools for migrating Oracle SOA services to the cloud are generally not available in the market. This makes Zensar’s SOA Migrator highly valuable to clients with migration needs.

The SOA migrator enables user-friendly UI to provision and migrates the SOA composites to Oracle Cloud.

It is an end-to-end automated solution for SOA environment creation and migration, reducing the cost of running a disposable SOA environment by 50% and migration costs by 40%. The migrator also reduces production migration time by 10x, the testing time to validate the services by 20x, and the time to clone/create new environments by 10x.

Digital innovation

Zensar has built the Intelligent Digital Innovation Platform using various Oracle PaaS technologies for building advanced solutions in and around cloud SaaS and edge solutions.

The Intelligent Digital Innovation Platform provides clients with 360 degrees SaaS extensions and pre-built AI-based chatbots that are configurable for providing any kind of L1 support. As a result, it reduces the L1 support desk efforts and costs by 40-50% and optimizes HR with automated support.

Smart application management services (AMS)

The Smart AMS platform provisions for Oracle application support and maintenance services, providing agile AMS, shared services and subscription-based automated testing services.

It provides AMS chatbots, enables subscription-based automated testing and supports processes based on industry best practices. It reduces the TCO by automating repeatable processes.

Leveraging intelligent solutions to streamline cloud adoption

With its wide range of solutions, Oracle Cloud opens up a world of possibilities for businesses to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. While overhauling your organization’s IT infrastructure can be a long process with numerous inherent challenges, the rewards of undertaking such a project far outweigh the difficulties. After all, a successful cloud transformation journey will provide long-term benefits and competitive advantages and help you succeed in an increasingly complex business landscape. Onboarding an experienced partner can make all the difference, helping you address transformation challenges and achieve targets faster with reduced costs and complexity. By providing a unified platform to manage the entire process, Zensar is further streamlining the journey and ensuring business continuity while enabling organizations to unlock their potential. For enterprises, there is now no reason to look back. From improved user experiences to increased productivity, it is time to make the most of the new enterprise IT paradigm.