How to Improve Your Ellucian Banner Security Posture on Oracle Cloud

Enhance your institution’s security governance, data protection, and privacy systems by migrating Ellucian Banner workloads to Oracle Cloud.

For large, complex organizations like universities or colleges, maintaining the highest level of security and data protection is an integral part of their internal operations. As Covid 19 has forced universities to expand remote learning and teaching, they now have the additional challenge of securing information over these expanded networks while still expanding online learning services at a rapid pace.

While online access and the related security measures are important to consider, higher education customers have to look at a holistic security model to ensure that they are compliant, secure and auditable. This calls for a layered security approach, from the network layer on up to the application layer, with appropriate security protocols and services applied at each, to meet business needs.

Threats to security often arise from internal sources that have access to unencrypted data in files and databases. This, coupled with loose security access controls can lead to disastrous consequences, that are hard to identify and proactively prevent.

Today, Ellucian Banner customers are looking to the Cloud to improve their security posture. Cloud providers have security tools and services natively integrated into core infrastructure and platform services that Banner applications can take advantage of without having to incur costly implementation fees. Moving EllucianBanner applications and related infrastructure to the Cloud can help you improve security, disaster recovery and data privacy measures.

In recent years, the conversation in the C-Suite has largely shifted from Why Cloud to When and How Cloud. CIO’s agree that moving to Cloud infrastructure is no longer considered cutting edge, rather Cloud is table stakes for the modern, agile organization.

Furthermore, Cloud providers and Cloud implementation partners have made it easy to migrate to Cloud with an array of automation tools and utilities to ensure your success. However, while migrating to Cloud is an easy decision to make, choosing the right Cloud vendor requires due diligence and analysis. Cloud providers can overwhelm you with options making it difficult to sort the wheat through the chaff.

As you evaluate Cloud, make security one, if not the top priority in your decision making process and look for Cloud providers and services that deliver as many natively integrated security capabilities as possible.

Among the various cloud providers available, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers a number of Cloud-native security services and tools for Ellucian Banner customers, including data masking, data encryption (at rest, in motion), file encryption, secure network connectivity, intrusion detection and prevention, disaster recovery, integrated data security, and other advantages when compared with AWS, Azure or GCP. With its next-generation cloud capabilities and security-first design, OCI leads the cloud service industry providing the highest performing and most cost-effective option for managing and protecting your mission-critical data and applications. Since Banner applications run on Oracle database, Oracle provides the most comprehensive set of database security and performance features on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that make it a compelling value to customers.

8 Ways to Enhance Your Banner Security Posture on OCI

The following is a list of how you can improve your Ellucian Banner security posture when you lift and shift to Oracle Cloud.

1. Achieve Your Security, Compliance and Privacy Goals

When deciding on which Cloud provider to partner with for your security needs, the first and most important aspect to consider is how this infrastructure will push you closer to your objectives for governing your security, compliance and privacy programs. Banner ERP on Oracle Cloud presents a number of opportunities and ways to improve your current security applications to better align with your goals.

Whether it’s database security, application monitoring, network security, disaster recovery, or audit compliance, OCI offers a variety of proactive security-first solutions to ensure you’re prepared for any potential adverse scenario.

2. Eliminate the Common Issues with On-Premise Applications

Running Banner on-premise comes with a long list of added stresses and responsibilities. In addition to the risk of power outages or natural disasters that could lead to a detrimental loss of data, you could also be dealing with internal threats and loopholes in security that could leave your data compromised. You also have to consider the cost of identifying, eliminating and remediating such risks on-premise, and compare and contrast those with the cost reductions and security efficiency gains you will receive by running Banner on Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Database Cloud Service includes Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) by default as well as file and network encryption among a host of other security measures. We understand that the security risks of running Banner on-premise are significant. When you migrate Banner to the Oracle Cloud, you eliminate these risks and instead, gain a more secure, scalable, auditable, compliant, and cost-effective solution for Banner ERP.

3. Automate Security Processes for Higher Performance

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is constantly improving their software, and Cloud Platform services such as Database Cloud Service, Exadata Cloud Service, and Autonomous Database include native data encryption, data masking and key management services. Infrastructure services such as Load Balancer Cloud Service, Web Application Firewall, Secure Virtual Private Network, Block/File/Object Storage all have API’s and automation tools that simplify security management, security monitoring and maintenance. Oracle Cloud also provides subscription services to ensure protection from misconfiguration errors.

By moving Ellucian Banner to OCI, you can improve your security posture for Banner applications and the entire infrastructure stack that Banner runs on. automate your security applications and workloads to reduce the risk of error and enhance performance. OCI allows you to detect, prevent and block threats and reduce security risk more efficiently and for a fraction of the cost.

4. Reduce Risk and Concern of Advanced Threats

Recognizing an attack is one thing, but preventing the threat is another. Instead of spending a substantial amount of resources reversing the damage done to your assets and reputation, you can adopt a comprehensive database and infrastructure security solution when deploy opt Banner ERP on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Ellucian Banner on Oracle Cloud allows you to improve your compliance reporting, deploy all-inclusive data encryption solutions, and prevent advanced threats from causing significant damage. With OCI, you can take advantage of self-healing architecture, fault-tolerant solutions native Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Events, and Functions, high-availability with built-in tenant isolation. OCI allows you to use native as well as third-party IDS and IPS solutions to monitor inbound and outbound traffic to further enhance your security posture.

5. Gain Faster, More Dependable Disaster Recovery Solutions

Disaster recovery goes hand in hand with data protection and security. Oracle Cloud’s disaster recovery solutions for any ERP allow your enterprise to be completely prepared for any potential threat to your systems.

When it comes to disaster recovery, managing Banner ERP on Oracle Cloud can guarantee business continuity, resilience and reliability. OCI enables its customers to safeguard their essential business operations and mission-critical applications through Cloud-native security solutions or their own security assets optimized on the Cloud.

If you compare Oracle’s disaster recovery solutions to other Cloud vendors, including AWS, OCI is fast. Because of its advanced automation capabilities, each disaster recovery step can be executed quickly. While on-premise DR can take months to complete, OCI allows Banner customers to deploy workloads to be fully operational in less than a week.

6. Move to OCI for 3 Times Less of the Cost

As we mentioned above, on-premise data security can become quite expensive to maintain. Providing electricity, power and management for physical data centers, combined with the costs to set up servers at secondary locations and not to mention, the overhead of supporting and testing these systems… it all adds up and eats up a substantial chunk of your budget.

Migrating Banner to Oracle Cloud eliminates all of the costs of maintaining physical data center locations. OCI provides Ellucian customers with scalable and customizable security solutions that work within their budget while still guaranteeing the highest performing applications and capabilities.

7. Utilize OCI’s In-Depth Global Data Protection

For over 40 years, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been evolving to deliver the highest level of security-first architecture and global data protection. When you choose to migrate your Ellucian Banner ERP to OCI, you can leverage the isolated network virtualization and elite physical host deployment to protect your business’s most valuable assets on a global scale.

8. Manage and Maintain Security Posture

With a security-first design, Oracle extends its tiered defenses and highly secured operations, ranging from on-premise hardware to Cloud environments. Banner users can utilize OCI’s superior customer isolation that they won’t receive with earlier public Cloud designs.

Oracle’s security architecture is designed to meet the needs of enterprises managing complex and critical workloads. These platform security capabilities are implemented through isolated network visualization, safe firmware installation, contained physical network, and network segmentation.

OCI also offers data and service resiliency and back-ups for any number of availability domains or regions. Fault tolerance is installed into each service and data architecture to ensure redundancy and full protection from threats.

Additionally, Oracle deploys a high level of physical security for data centers and provider locations. Each location undergoes a full inspection and evaluation of potential threats. These physical locations are required to have resilient power sources and generator back-ups. Oracle ensures all physical locations meet their requirements for being secure, risk-free and prepared for disaster.

Oracle Cloud also provides options, including least-privilege access, which reduces risk of an attacker hacking into the system by limiting access to only approved users; multiple authentication layers, which implements multiple layers of advanced access control to prevent an attacker gaining access due to weak password protections; internal connectivity, which enable data privacy as information is transferred between different Cloud networks; and external connectivity, which provides two ways to securely connect OCI to third-party networks.

Conclusion

Higher education organizations store massive amounts of sensitive information. It is critical for these large institutions to implement the best practices for security and data protection.

Migrating to Cloud is made easy with Oracle. Ellucian Banner customers can implement Oracle’s powerful security solutions with little to no down-time or disruption to their regular business operations.

Working with an Oracle Partner, like Astute Business Solutions, can help you make the move to Cloud as smooth and frictionless as possible. We specialize in creating innovative solutions tailored to a business’s individual needs so that they can execute an efficient transition to OCI and see success with the software faster.

For Ellucian Banner customers, migrating to Oracle Cloud is the best way to ensure you’re gaining the highest performing solutions for business continuity, disaster recovery, security and global data protection. Lift & Shift Banner to OCI and improve your security posture with Astute Business Solutions to guarantee a smooth transition to Cloud.

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To learn more about Ellucian Banner to Oracle Cloud visit our website.Ready to get started on your cloud journey? Schedule a meeting with an Astute team member.