Benefits of Moving Ellucian Banner to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

For small and large institutions alike, running Ellucian Banner on-premise or in another hosted environment is challenging. It requires a significant amount of skill and manpower.

In summary, on-premise solutions for Ellucian Banner demand higher operational costs with low levels of automation capabilities. It puts a strain on resources and budgeting without addressing key issues like security concerns, application maintenance, data solutions, and disaster recovery.

From building new instances to patching your databases, infrastructures, and applications to cloning and refreshing your workloads, manually managing Ellucian Banner on-premise is time-consuming. Less automation can also leave your infrastructure potentially prone to manual errors, which can lead to outages and other complications that can be avoided altogether.

Additionally, operating Ellucian Banner on-premise is heavily resource-dependent. It means your critical support areas, such as your Banner admins, database admins, as well as your system admins, are all constrained in providing skill and resource support to these applications.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the Solution

Moving your Ellucian Banner ERP from an on-premise environment to the Cloud is the solution. In recent years, it has become an imperative decision for C-level executives to make in order to protect their business-critical applications and set their institution up for a more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable future. Today, Cloud is the new normal.

Within the landscape of the Cloud, the industry has become overly saturated with different services. It can make it difficult to know which one is right for your organization’s specific needs and, most important, goals. Among the many cloud services, the one that stands out is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

OCI gives universities the option of lifting and shifting their Ellucian Banner infrastructure to the Cloud in an efficient and cost-effective manner without sacrificing any of the aspects of their current system that are working well for their needs. Oracle offers a number of useful tools that address the key issues you’ve been experiencing so that you can optimize Ellucian Banner TCO. 

By moving and improving your Ellucian Banner applications and workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can reduce operational costs, gain highly automated solutions, and modernize your organization’s security, data protection, disaster recovery, and more. OCI provides a seamless migration process so that you can accelerate Banner to Cloud to integrate with the most popular software and technology that you’re probably already using.

“We needed to move our Ellucian Banner environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in a very short period of time. In Astute, we found more than a vendor with the technical and project management skills to deliver our needed outcomes – we found a trusted partner that became part of our team, helped deliver a successful migration and will continue to support our long-term success in OCI.”

- Dan Ewart, VP of Information Technology Chief Information Officer, University of Idaho

Read on to learn more about the solutions. You’ll earn when you lift and shift your Ellucian Banner ERP to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

1. Application Maintenance

As mentioned above, maintaining your Ellucian Banner applications on-premise is done manually. It includes upgrading new releases, patching related databases, infrastructures and applications, as well as fixing patches and other operations within your infrastructure.

When executed manually, these activities are time-consuming and prone to error. Not to mention, there are time restrictions that must be followed in order to stay up to date with your applications and current with new releases.

Ellucian Banner on OCI comes with the option for Banner ERP Managed Services, which is an automated, predictable way to keep your patches and fixes up to date and current for a predictable cost.

2. Deployment Time

When it comes to deploying upgrades, installations, cloning, and refreshing on-premise, these activities are done on a manual, check-list basis. These processes often have long lead times depending on what other activities are queued up in your IT organization in terms of projects and priorities.

With Ellucian Banner on OCI, you can rely heavily on automation for all installs, upgrades, clones, patches, and refresh processes. By using the orchestration capabilities and other available tools, you can send a script to Oracle Cloud to perform migrations, installations, and monitoring. You gain access to several capabilities that allow you to simplify the process and reduce the time it would take you to do so on-premise by a substantial amount.

3. Data Security

Data security is paramount and should never be overlooked. Operating Ellucian Banner on-premise offers limited database security and encryption.

By moving Ellucian Banner to the cloud and taking advantage of the Oracle Database Cloud Services available, you can ensure that your mission-critical database is secure and encrypted. On OCI, Database Transparent Database Encryption (TDE) is natively enabled at the Database Cloud Services level, along with advanced mechanisms for file encryption and network security.

4. Capacity Management

Managing your Ellucian Banner applications on-premise requires you to procure, set up, and maintain the right hardware. It also demands that you purchase maintenance contracts and consistently refresh these contracts to stay up to date with new releases and versions of your particular hardware. This option is not proactively managed, nor is it optimized for efficiency or cost-effectiveness.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for Ellucian Banner is an elastic service. It means that it provides the right-sized architecture that meets your current needs at the start while remaining elastic and scalable to be able to grow with your business as its needs evolve.

5. Disaster Recovery

When you run Ellucian Banner on OCI, you gain access to multiple automated tools that allow you to build an effective disaster recovery architecture. This process takes a fraction of the amount of time to complete for a fraction of the cost that you would spend for an on-premise Disaster Recovery solution.

6. Operational Costs

In order to make the business case to management for migrating Ellucian Banner applications to OCI, the first obvious reason is the cost equation. With Cloud, you’ll achieve a significant reduction in operational costs by eliminating the expense of purchasing, installing, maintaining, and refreshing on-premise hardware and switching to a predictable cost model. Banner on OCI allows you to control how much and when you spend your resources.

7. Optimized Performance

It is not uncommon for organizations with on-premise infrastructures to struggle with the need for performance at the right time. This model is lacking in predictability, elasticity, and scalability.

When you move Ellucian Banner to OCI, you can optimize performance quickly and easily, and you gain the ability to scale your systems up and down as needed. OCI allows you to control which architectures require high performance and which ones can run on low performance.

For example, you can deploy a high-performance architecture for production while your pre-production or development environments can run on a lesser-performing architecture. And you can take advantage of the cost benefits of both options.

8. Innovation

Migrating to the cloud not only offers institutions a way to save money, scale their systems to meet their needs, and optimize performance, but it also makes room for innovation. By automating many of the manual processes that require hours of valuable time, you can streamline integrations and workflows, which would allow your employees to focus on areas that can be improved or innovated with the adoption of new features.

OCI is continuously upgrading and releasing new features to help improve its infrastructure based on feedback from the Oracle and Ellucian Banner community. When you integrate your current infrastructure with OCI, you give your business the room it needs to grow.

Why Ellucian Banner is Better On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compared to AWS

When it comes time to make the move to lift and shift your Ellucian Banner ERP to Cloud, you’ll discover a multitude of cloud service options. Among the cloud options, AWS offers hosted and managed architectures for Ellucian Banner customers and it is one of the most common solutions you’ll see for running Banner on Cloud.

74% less networking cost on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for outbound bandwidth compared to AWS.

However, there are several reasons why choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over AWS or Azure is the wiser choice as a solution for your business.

1. Automated Migration

Migrating Banner to the Cloud should not be a painful, long-drawn, or unpredictable process. It should be an easy and cost-efficient undertaking. It is one of the advantages of choosing to automate Banner with a lift and shift to OCI.

OCI, in partnership with RackWare migration tools and Terraform/Ansible, provides a completely automated process to make your migration and configuration for disaster recovery, security, and more as painless as possible. OCI relies heavily on Terraform and Ansible for building and configuring networks and the security rules that accompany them.

Additionally, as a leader in the industry of data storage and security, Oracle offers Oracle Cloud Service or Oracle Database as a Service (DBaaS), which gives you the ability to simply push a button to deploy, patch, or scale a database. DbaaS makes it easy and convenient to monitor each deployment and database automatically.

2. Simplified Management

Once you’ve completed the migration process, the next aspect to consider is managing your architectures, database, applications, and workflows. You may ask yourself, who is managing this for me? Is it difficult or easy? With OCI, you gain simplified management with automated processes.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers automation for the following processes:

• Infrastructure and Database Patching
• Cloud Monitoring
• Building and Tearing Down New Instances
• Starting/Stopping Instances
• Refreshing and Cloning Instances
  
  

3. Lower Costs and Risk

Reducing operational costs is a major reason why businesses are choosing to migrate to Cloud. Everyone wants to lower their costs and opt for a more predictable cost model. However, not everyone understands exactly how to do so.

At the beginning of their fiscal year in June 2020, Oracle dropped their pricing for database cloud services by 20%. While OCI was already offering competitive pricing compared to on-premise options, this significant price drop makes an even more compelling case for why OCI is the best choice for your database service. When you look at the costs of pure infrastructure, including network, storage, and compute VMs, OCI fares quite favorably when compared to AWS or Azure.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers 44% lower compute cost for High Performance Computing.

The key takeaway, however, is that OCI allows you to control the costs. You decide what you are spending your budget on, how often you’re spending, and when. It is entirely up to you.

The key takeaway, however, is that OCI allows you to control the costs. You decide what you are spending your budget on, how often you’re spending and when. It is entirely up to you. 

4. Agility and Elasticity

Compared to AWS or Azure, OCI provides better solutions for agility and elasticity. As your business evolves, your needs and requirements for your cloud database services will too. OCI delivers on-demand provisioning and automated capabilities to make it convenient and simple to scale your architectures, instances, and applications up and down to meet your changing needs.

OCI offers 2x better compute price per performance for general purpose and memory-optimized VMs.

With OCI, you do not have to worry about whether your network router, database infrastructure, or operating system are patched or if your security loopholes are managed automatically. Oracle provides you with a technology platform that is always current and up-to-date.

Additionally, Oracle customers have choices. Oracle offers multiple solutions, including hybrid options, to allow you to decide what will work best for your business needs. It means that you have the ability to deploy Cloud on-premise with Oracle’s Cloud Customer Solution. You can do a hybrid deployment, which means Ellucian Banner is deployed on OCI in the public cloud while your other applications remain deployed in your current on-premise data center.

5. Built for Enterprise

Another advantage for Ellucian Banner on OCI is that it is built for enterprises and their robust demands. The Gen2 solution that is currently being used to migrate Banner customers to the Cloud is built for hyper scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance.

Ellucian Banner customers can also depend on OCI for high performance options, as well as enhanced security and compliance measures. Within larger organizations, these capabilities can offer peace of mind and confidence that all aspects are being properly monitored and protected.

6. Seamless Integration

In today’s world, it would be unwise for any business to rely on one infrastructure for all workloads. For this reason, Oracle has made it possible to implement hybrid multi-cloud solutions. OCI makes it easy to work with third-party tools and workloads to run Ellucian Banner applications on the Cloud, as well as offers seamless integrations with other cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP and on-premise environments.

Accelerated Ellucian Banner Lift and Shift with Astute Business Solutions

Now that you understand the extensive benefits you can gain by migrating your Ellucian Banner applications and workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, let’s discuss how Astute Business Solutions can simplify the process of moving to the Cloud. With over 100 cloud migrations under our belt, we can ensure that your Banner-to-Cloud transition will be seamless and effective.

As we design your unique implementation plan to move Banner to OCI, our goal is to strategically align with your business’s goals and needs to provide a reliable outcome. The first aspect we consider is cost-efficiency and where we can minimize costs while maximizing OCI’s adaptable tools and resources.

We work with you to right-size your infrastructure, systems, and tools, avoid any outages with OCI’s redundancy capabilities, and set up the fastest path to successful deployments by introducing OCI’s automation and orchestration, including PaaS and IaaS.

Throughout our years of experience, we’ve worked with Banner customers who require a completely managed service solution and others who only need a partner to guide them through the initial migration process. We also offer Banner Flex Support for customers who need occasional assistance. Whatever solution you need, we provide the same set of standards for building a cloud to ensure you receive a scalable, stable, and automated infrastructure and that you have access to all of the controls you’ll need to be set up for success.

As your partner, we consider not only the first steps of your move to the Cloud but also the manageability and best practices for monitoring, auditing capabilities, fault tolerance, security, and data encryption. We help our clients take advantage of all the tools OCI has to offer to improve performance while reducing operational costs, risks, and time spent managing Ellucian Banner.

In Conclusion

Running Ellucian Banner on-premise is not only challenging but comes with great risk in this day and age. The reasons are endless upgrade your current infrastructure and adopt a more practical solution.

Moving to Cloud is no longer a question of why but how and when. More and more institutions are recognizing the advantages of migrating their Ellucian Banner ERP to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to optimize performance and gain a scalable, automated, and secure alternative for their data center needs.

To learn more about Ellucian Banner on Oracle Cloud, visit Ellucian Banner on OCI or schedule a meeting with an Astute team member.