The challenge, however, is that where enterprise technology should be the enabler of this kind of forward-thinking strategy, it’s often a blocker. Siloed, legacy systems aren’t future-ready and hold organizations back. They limit their ability to react to opportunities, provide poor customer experiences, are expensive to license and tie up disproportionate amounts of skilled teams’ time on low-level tasks, just to keep the business available.

This needs to change. Organizations must free themselves from these challenges. They must liberate their technology teams to confidently focus on the work that’s going to make their business stand out as a true leader, capable of being the disruptor, rather than the disrupted.

Getting to the core of the business to unleash innovation

So how do organizations change this? How do they turn themselves into the ‘fast fish’ that World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab identified as the organizations that will thrive in the new world, by eating the ‘slow fish’? The key is the technology that sits at the very core of the organization. Thousands of businesses and government bodies around the world rely on Oracle to underpin their critical operations. Therefore, the foundations for these Oracle and Oracle-based applications need to align with the way modern organizations want to operate.

They need to empower innovation, by providing a flexible and agile platform that enables new initiatives to be prototyped and piloted quickly and cost-effectively. Data- and databases-on-demand are essential. Rapid DevOps and testing cycles are a must. At the same time, the platform must deliver the necessary levels of performance, availability, resilience and security. These give the organization the essential confidence it needs to focus on the higher-value innovation and IPcreation work, safe in the knowledge its critical core systems won’t let it down. Lastly, the platform must help the organization reduce costs, thereby freeing up precious resources for the high-value tasks that will help turn it into a true disruptor.

What does an optimized Oracle platform look like?

The key when designing a platform that will play such a key role in an organization, is to tailor it to the needs of the business, but use proven architecture designs. One size doesn’t fit all, and it’s important to make sure the platform is designed to support what the business is trying to accomplish. But at the same time, using proven sector- and purpose-specific blueprints means everything has been tried and shown to work as expected. By following this well-trodden path, you dramatically accelerate time-to-value and minimize risk.

The multi-cloud choices

Cloud is an obvious building block for a flexible and future-ready platform. But in today’s multicloud world, there’s no single cloud that’s ideal for all workloads. Private cloud and the Oracle public cloud are the obvious choices for enterprise workloads, but Azure and AWS also have their role to play, particularly for Microsoft and web-centric workloads. Importantly, all cloud options – including private and hybrid – give you the freedom to get out of running your own data center, and instead use state-of-the-art cloud-connected hosting facilities. From here, dedicated connections enable you to link seamlessly to your customers and the public clouds, creating a truly optimized hybrid platform for your critical Oracle systems.

Integrate and optimize the user experience

No system works in isolation: when you move something to an optimized cloud platform, it will be sending data back and forth to numerous other applications and data stores in your organization and beyond. Can data be sent over the public internet, or do you need a private connection? How fast do different connections need to be? Smart organizations make sure these integrations are all optimized to provide the right levels of performance and resilience, using revolutionary techniques such as Method R to achieve exceptionally high levels of confidence in their cloud application’s performance ahead of go-live.

Optimizing the commercials

The technology architecture design and delivery are critical parts of the journey to an optimized enterprise cloud, but it’s also important to address the commercials. It’s common for organizations not to be using the advanced monitoring and security options needed in the modern world, because they don’t have the budget to license these on their legacy technology. It’s also surprising how often we find organizations that simply aren’t getting maximum value from their existing license investments. To be a true innovator, you need to squeeze every last drop of value from your Oracle investments. Making the transition to the cloud is the ideal time to assess and optimize your Oracle commercial footprint, gearing it towards flexibility, growth and cloud adoption. Switching your Oracle software from commodity hardware to Oracle public or private cloud technology can reduce your licensing requirement by as much as 30%. This instantly frees up headroom for additional options and capabilities, demonstrating one of the many ways that optimized Oracle architectures can be a real enabler of innovation and growth.

Cloud managed services

Something we touched on earlier was the need to free up in-house operational teams to focus more on higher-value business objectives, such as innovation. Moving to an enterprise cloud platform takes away a certain amount of administrative burden from in-house teams. But there’s still a need to monitor the complete technology stack in the cloud, 24x7, and proactively manage it. Whether you’re a large organization or a smaller one, doing this in-house is costly and risky, with all the challenges around covering for illness and vacations, providing out-of-hours support and ensuring knowledge isn’t lost when employees leave.

That’s why the final piece in the jigsaw is to partner with a specialist cloud managed services provider. This organization will take away these challenges, and give you the additional peace of mind of a contractual service level agreement on fast incident response times and platform availability. What’s more, a truly forward-thinking managed services provider will do more than simply be reactive: they’ll proactively seek out ways for you to get more from your enterprise cloud investments, including through preventative maintenance and automation of operational tasks.

Powerful business benefits and outcomes

Put together, the optimized blueprinted cloud architecture, commercials, user experiences and managed services deliver exceptional modernday benefits. They give forward-thinking organizations both a platform on which to build an agile, high-growth business, and the human and financial resources to actually deliver it today and in the future. It’s this powerful combination that’s enabling smart businesses to turn themselves into disruptors that are the envy of their competitors, leading the way in their industries.