With cloud spend growing at a double-digit rate, it’s clear that business are embracing cloud technology solutions. But how should businesses prepare for the cloud? By optimising for today with a simple and standardised on-premise infrastructure, you can capitalise on cloud transformation while reducing costs, enhancing security, and improving availability.

But what boxes need to be ticked in order to ensure your infrastructure is cloud-ready?

A single solution

Seeing as most IT suppliers either provide on-premises infrastructure or public cloud offerings, you need to make sure both work in harmony. This can be a sizeable task and is no guarantee for successful cloud deployment.

But what if there was a solution that brought the same architecture, management tools, and processes together? This is what the Oracle Public Cloud delivers – equivalence across three deployment models: on-premises, public cloud, and public cloud in your data centre.

There’s no need to invest in extensive integration or complicated multi-vendor support, while your on-premise investments are future-proofed and preserved.

Keeping costs down

When it comes to applications that need to remain in-house, there is still room to drive cost savings in your on-premises infrastructure. For example, you can minimise virtualisation and operating system (OS) licensing and support costs.

With systems like Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris, virtualisation is included along with OS licensing and support. When compared with VMware licenses, maintenance, and support costs, which also come with limited cloud choices, the money saving benefits are obvious. One luxury car manufacturer even reduced TCO by 20 per cent by eliminating VMWare and Red Hat licenses to the tune of USD$5 million.

Cloud-converged storage

Even if you aren’t quite ready to move critical applications to the public cloud, a lot can be said for cloud storage in the meantime. Cloud-based storage solutions such as data backup and archive are some of the easiest and most effective ways of making the most of public cloud economics.

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance supports thousands of users, billions of transactions, and hundreds of application environments. It uses proven, high-performance architecture to support dynamic cloud environments and achieve cloud-level storage consolidation.