Sierra-Cedar

The Sierra-Cedar AWS solutions enable organizations to modernize infrastructure, migrate workloads, and optimize performance on Amazon Web Services. By offering expert cloud strategy, automation and managed services, Sierra-Cedar ensures secure, scalable, and cost-effective environments and helps businesses to accelerate digital transformation, enhance reliability, and achieve long-term operational success in a competitive cloud-first world.

Sierra-Cedar FlexOps is a new cloud automation system designed to simplify IT activities. It enhances deployment, monitoring, system performance, reduces downtime and human effort. Created to be scalable and efficient, FlexOps helps companies to optimize their cloud environments, enhance reliability, and focus on innovation with secure, intelligent and cost-effective infrastructure management solutions. Click here....

The Oracle Student Management Cloud allows colleges and universities to manage student data (record keeping), admissions (acceptance and enrollment), academics (programs of study), and services (support for students) via a centralized cloud-based platform/solution. It increases overall efficiency, enhances the student experience, supports data-based decision-making, and provides ongoing support to all campus operations.

With a motto of “Innovating since 1641,” the City of Stamford, CT continues to pursue progress by modernizing its 30-year-old financials system with Oracle Cloud applications. In this episode of Sierra-Cedar’s OnCloud9 Conversations, we share observations and lessons learned during the first half of this project. To watch the video, Visit Here:

As more companies move towards digital transformation, cloud computing has become a key component of IT Strategy. Among the many cloud providers, the Oracle Cloud platform provides robust features for enterprise applications, database management, infrastructure services, and more. However, successfully working with the Oracle Cloud platform requires expertise; therefore, this is where an Oracle Cloud Consultant provides critical value.

An Oracle Cloud Consultant will help organizations navigate the complex process of adopting a Cloud environment, which leads to a maximum level of performance, decreased costs, and alignment between technology and business objectives.

Understanding Oracle Cloud Consulting

Oracle Cloud Consulting provides professional services and recommendations regarding the planning, implementation, and optimization of an Oracle Cloud environment. In addition to supporting all phases of project execution, Oracle Consultants provide experience and expertise to ensure the success of the Cloud Adoption process. Greatly reducing the overall risk for organizations migrating from an on-premise system or upgrading from another Cloud provider is why businesses choose Oracle Cloud Consulting services.

Why Businesses Choose Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud provides a full set of services, including infrastructure, platform, and software services. The Oracle Cloud Service suite is specifically designed to support enterprise users of Oracle applications. Examples of this include ERP, HCM, and database applications.

Some of the key benefits of using Oracle Cloud include:

• Oracle Cloud has been built on a highly available, high-performance platform for enterprise workloads.

• Oracle Cloud has sophisticated capabilities for managing and analyzing data.

• Oracle Cloud includes secure and compliant features that are integrated into the overall system architecture.

• Oracle Cloud is scalable—businesses can grow while leveraging the Oracle Cloud Service suite.

• Oracle Cloud is designed to be integrated with other on-premises Oracle application products.

Regardless of how great these advantages may be, businesses still encounter problems when implementing and optimizing their solutions, resulting in a need for consulting services.

Key Benefits of Oracle Cloud Consulting

Here are the strategies outlined in this guide for moving to the Cloud.

1. Strategic Planning and Roadmap

Your organization has its own unique IT environment made up of many systems and applications. The Oracle Cloud Consultants will evaluate your current state, including your technology and infrastructure, and propose a custom-developed plan to move to the cloud that meets the requirements of your business. By starting this process with a defined roadmap for your migration, implementation, and ongoing growth, you'll be able to plan the best path forward.

2. Smooth Migration Process

The size of the enterprise and the number of systems and applications being moved to the cloud impact the complexity of a migration. With the Oracle Cloud Consulting Services, you will have a structured migration process that helps minimize downtime, protects your data, and significantly decreases the costs associated with the migration disruption.

3. Cost Optimization

Cloud expenses can easily escalate without the right level of pre-planning. Working with the Oracle Cloud Consulting team, your organization can optimize the use of resources in the cloud, use the correct pricing model, and avoid unnecessary expenditures.

4. Increased security and regulation

The safety of an organization is priority one. Oracle Cloud Consultants provide configuration assistance to ensure organizations follow “best practices” regarding safe storage and transfer of data, control over who accesses data, and ensuring compliance with regulations that may apply to your organization.

5. Performance improvements

Cloud consulting companies/consultants consistently monitor their clients’ cloud environments to make adjustments to enhance the performance of their environments, which results in improved speed of applications, better experience for users, and increased efficiency of operations.

Core Services Offered

Services generally provided by Oracle Cloud Consultants encompass the entire cloud lifecycle:

• Cloud readiness assessment: Review of current environments to ascertain readiness for cloud adoption

• Moving applications, data, and workloads from on-premises to the cloud

• Implementing and integrating the solution

• Ongoing management support for cloud environment

• Performance enhancement and implementation of new features

Services help organizations to utilize the full potential of Oracle Cloud without placing additional burden on their internal resources.

Addressing Common Challenges

Although Oracle Cloud provides many benefits to organizations, there are considerable challenges faced when adopting the use of Oracle Cloud, such as:

• Lack of available expertise within organization

• Complex legacy systems

• Risk associated with data transfer

• Existing application integration issues

• Ongoing support of the cloud environment

Oracle Cloud Consulting helps organizations overcome these obstacles by providing the specialized expertise required to address these issues along with proven methodology and support for successful completion of projects.

Future-Proofing Your Business

Organizations today must adapt quickly to the changing digital world, so they seek scalable and flexible technology. New innovations powered by Oracle Cloud Technology include new types of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Next-Level Data Analytics.

Using an Oracle Cloud Consultant helps an organization not just migrate to the cloud, but then continue to evolve the technology they have on the cloud to be able to meet future requirements.

In Closing

An organization needs to have an effective IT Infrastructure Modernization Strategy; this is a powerful first step, and by utilizing Oracle Cloud Technology, it can accomplish this goal. To achieve the full benefits of the use of Oracle Cloud Technology, an organization needs to have expert support and expertise in the strategic development, execution, and ongoing support of its Oracle Cloud Journey.

Looking to get more from your enterprise systems? Our Oracle consulting experts help streamline operations, modernize platforms and unlock smarter decision making. Sierra-Cedar brings deep industry experience, practical strategy and hands-on support to guide your transformation from planning through long-term optimization.

Sierra-Cedar talks with higher education clients at the 2022 Alliance Conference to discuss PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. To watch our video, Click Here.

Planning an Oracle Cloud to PeopleSoft Migration can feel complex, but the right partner makes it seamless. Sierra-Cedar helps assess environments, protect data, reduce risk, and ensure business continuity with proven tools, deep functional knowledge, and hands-on guidance from strategy through post-migration optimization.

As companies using PeopleSoft face increased demands for up-to-date technology infrastructures while also needing stable systems with sound operations, security, and performance levels, traditional on-premise data centre environments tend to be expensive, restrictive, and hard to scale efficiently.

A lot of businesses have begun using hosting services (utilizing AWS) for their PeopleSoft application as part of their overall strategic approach because Hosting Services give them all the benefits of Utilizing PeopleSoft ("the Reliability of using the PeopleSoft Application") or "the Reliability of Using an Application that Is Hosted on the Internet"), yet also provides the flexibility offered by Cloud Computing.

With hosting your PeopleSoft application on AWS, you will receive all the benefits of using a current (modern) scalable platform that is adaptable to the current and future needs of today’s fast-paced world, without sacrificing performance or compliance.

Reasons for Moving Your PeopleSoft Application to AWS.

PeopleSoft continues to be a critical component of how many businesses perform their HR, finance, supply chain, and campus solution functions. Because the majority of existing customers have been required to support their own data centres from the original purchase of PeopleSoft, this requirement has created many challenges for those organizations, including equipment Refresh cycles, increases in ongoing operational expenses, and limited disaster recovery capabilities.

By leveraging the AWS infrastructure and having the ability to manage your PeopleSoft application in an off-site, remote, or cloud-based environment, you have significantly improved your chances of continuing to support your PeopleSoft applications while minimizing or eliminating any challenges you may experience with your current infrastructure.

The AWS infrastructure is designed to provide stability, sustainability, geographical diversity, and industry-leading Security and Compliance features, which make it an excellent choice for PeopleSoft-related workloads.

Benefits of hosting AWS PeopleSoft:

1. Flexibility and Efficiency.

AWS offers PeopleSoft customers the ability to scale their environment up or down through adjusted resources based on demand. Customers can scale up their PeopleSoft environment during peak payroll periods or end-of-quarter financial processing without needing new hardware to ensure consistent performance without over-provisioning.

2. Cost Savings.

Customers who use AWS for PeopleSoft receive a pay-as-you-go model that allows for only paying for the resources that you use. This reduces capital costs and provides more predictable ongoing operational/maintenance costs. Significant savings can also be achieved by properly sizing environments and using automated scheduling for non-production systems.

3. Enhanced Security and Compliance.

AWS has established a strong security framework with features such as encryption, identity and access management, network isolation, and continuous monitoring that provide a solid security foundation for organisations that host PeopleSoft environments while also creating an additional layer for meeting regulatory and compliance standards and protecting sensitive data.

4. Disaster Recovery.

For PeopleSoft users, downtime can be very expensive. AWS will provide built-in redundancy across multiple availability zones and regions, facilitating the creation of a highly available configuration. Furthermore, the disaster recovery strategy can be implemented more efficiently within AWS and provide a more rapid recovery time than can be achieved with traditional on-premises environments.

Flexibility for Different PeopleSoft Environments

AWS' PeopleSoft hosting solutions help businesses with their development, staging, production and disaster recovery environments by providing the ability to create multiple copies of a single instance with the same configuration. This allows organizations to quickly manage updates, patches, and upgrades to all of their PeopleSoft instances.

Organizations can quickly deploy non-production environments to test new features or apply PeopleSoft updates, and can shut them down when they are no longer needed. This allows businesses to speed up their development cycles while still maintaining cost control.

Reduced Infrastructure Management Burden

When you run PeopleSoft on AWS, you eliminate many of the challenges of managing infrastructure. Infrastructure management is offloaded to the cloud provider, enabling your internal IT staff to focus on optimizing the application and innovating the business.

Automation tools within AWS can also assist organizations to automate their operations, such as backing up their data, monitoring, and tuning performance. These features allow organizations to maintain the stability, security, and performance of their PeopleSoft environment over time.

Supporting Long-Term PeopleSoft Strategy

Many organizations plan on continuing to use PeopleSoft for many years because of the depth of functionality and ongoing vendor support it offers. The AWS Hosting PeopleSoft services align well with a business's long term strategy by providing an evolving, future-ready platform that reflects its business needs.

As the technology behind the cloud continues to improve, companies can effectively utilize current investments in the PeopleSoft application by integrating it with other cloud-based tools/analytics platforms/automation solutions in order to add additional value without having to completely replace their existing application.

Is AWS Hosting the Right Fit for Your PeopleSoft Environment?

No two companies have the same functional needs, but companies that would benefit most from hosting services AWS PeopleSoft, would be those looking for improved agility, increased availability of critical data through better disaster recovery capabilities, and/or reduced infrastructure-related costs. A thorough hosting strategy will assess the current workload of the PeopleSoft users, create performance requirements, and design an architecture that will assist in supporting both current and future needs.

Work with Sierra-Cedar’s trusted AWS cloud consultant team to design, migrate, and optimize AWS solutions that truly fit your business. We combine deep cloud expertise with a practical, human approach to improve agility, security, and long-term value across your AWS environment.

PeopleSoft has been an organization’s system of choice for many years, with all the trusted, support of a stable and familiar application used in day-to-day operations. As Digital Transformation has increased awareness of the importance of having flexibility in how companies manage their Technology Strategy, the need to evaluate the long-term impacts of carrying out a big impact on-premise system, such as PeopleSoft, is increasingly becoming a priority of executives.

Sierra-Cedar's VP of Higher Education, Garth Carter, asks the University of Texas at Austin Vice Provost of Enrollment Management, Brian Dixon, nine questions about the university's Oracle Student Financial Planning implementation. Watch our video here.