Selecting the Right Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider

Overview

As more and more Oracle customers adopt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for their computing needs, get out of the data center business and focus on their core mission. They are also looking to hire qualified Oracle Cloud Managed Service Providers (OCI MSP) who can manage their workloads on Oracle Cloud. The benefits of using an experienced cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP) to migrate your workloads to Cloud are well known. Managing workloads post-migration requires specialized skills and a deep understanding of the Cloud provider’s environment and the tools to optimize its use.

Not all MSPs are created equal. Most, if not all, will demonstrate capability and competency through certifications, third-party audits, and compliance requirements. However, there is more to MSP than just technical skills. The ideal OCI MSP partner, in addition to demonstrating technical expertise and experience on Oracle Cloud managing Oracle and Non-Oracle workloads, will need to have additional characteristics that will define your future success on the cloud.

Selecting the Right Cloud MSP for Your Business

Industry Focus

While Oracle ERP applications may largely be the same regardless of industry, the business processes, regulatory requirements, audit and compliance requirements, and culture vary significantly from one industry to another. The right Oracle Cloud MSP will not only understand your applications and the OCI architecture it will run on but also be able to offer services that meet your business needs.

Your cloud MSP should be able to provide effective governance through a flexible, hybrid delivery model. Through well-integrated processes and technologies, the MSP should be able to demonstrate their ability to secure your workloads, apply and manage security policies to secure personally identifiable information. They should also be able to follow industry best practices in managing workloads such as HIPAA for healthcare, GDPR across all industries, and more.

Broad Capabilities

When starting out on your Oracle Cloud journey, you may first consider deploying PeopleSoft on OCI, or Oracle databases on OCI in your first project. While you must evaluate and select a partner with the depth of expertise to help you succeed, you must also consider your Cloud roadmap and see what other workloads you want to migrate in future phases. This is also the time to decide whether the OCI MSP is capable of expanding its services to meet your needs. Ask if the MSP is capable of supporting Non-Oracle workloads and is able to support multi-cloud deployments that include OCI, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

The MSP should ensure that is can build and deploy on-demand cloud services through a hybrid service delivery environment and maintain a safe and current environment that your business-critical applications are run on, including industry-leading software on the latest-generation hardware and are supported by world-class infrastructure.

Provider Relationships

It is important to inquire about what relationships the OCI MSP has in the Oracle ecosystem and how deep and broad their network is. The right MSP will have ties into OCI Product Management, OCI Engineering, Channels and Alliances, Sales, and Marketing teams to name a few. They will be tightly integrated with the Oracle Cloud Success team to ensure that you are successful.

Automation Capabilities

With every new release, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is adding more services and better tools and utilities to deploy and maintain them. The OCI Console is a starting point for novices to configure, create and manage workloads but it is not where experts spend their time. Expert MSP Partners know that Infrastructure As Code automation using tools such as Terra-form or Ansible is the industry standard and they adopt them as best practices.

They also know that above the Infrastructure layer there are specific tools for Cloud Platform management and application life-cycle management that you may need for your Enterprise applications such as speakers. So the ideal partner would be one that can combine all of these automation capabilities and package them such that you get the benefits of a stringent SLA, improve performance, better monitoring, and audit compliance. When starting your Oracle Cloud journey, your MSP partner should demonstrate codified best practices in a suite of tools, automated capabilities, and collaboration models that can handle migration and ongoing management.

Delivering on the Cloud Promise

The right MSP is one that can talk the talk and walk the walk. Your success depends on it. You may set out on your cloud journey with the promise of cost savings, performance improvements, an extensive repository of platform and infrastructure services that you can tap into, enhance security controls, and much more. It’s easier said than done. The MSP partner to choose is the one who can show you before you evaluate and select that they have helped your peers and other similar customers not only achieve their goals but have measured outcomes and proven their success. Your MSP Partner should be your partner for continuous optimization, one that provides cost controls, governance, and accountability that ensure you generate long-term benefit.

Conclusion

The relation with an Oracle Cloud MSP is deep and broad, as it should be. It's a relationship that you will build mutual trust and offer a shared-risk, shared-reward relationship. With Oracle Cloud adoption growing at a fast rate, offering new services and capabilities every day, it makes sense that companies are leaning on Oracle MSPs with the right cloud management platforms, tools, and processes, to help them get the most value of their cloud investments.

Are you interested in an MSP partnership? Lets chat.