The State of Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) moved their PeopleSoft systems from on premises to OCI

When Oracle presented the idea of moving OMES’s PeopleSoft systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OMES formed a team and ran a pilot project to evaluate the outcome. Based on the pilot and recommendations from OMES executive management, the team decided to move their PeopleSoft systems from on premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

With OCI, the State of Oklahoma was able to take advantage of:

• Middle tier running on OCI with the database on the database cloud.
• Oracle architecture blueprint and roadmap for Oracle Cloud.
• Managed services provided by Oracle.
• Architected cloud service to address unique requirements.

The value of moving PeopleSoft to the Oracle Cloud broke down into four major areas for OMES:

• Development and test in the cloud.
• Production in the cloud.
• Backup and disaster recovery in the cloud.
• Extend the data center to the cloud.

With development and test in the cloud, OMES was able to test customizations and new application versions, validate patches, and test cloud-native technologies and frameworks like containers and CI/CD. With production in the cloud, we are able to utilize bare metal for consistency and industry-leading price and performance. OMES is also able to use multiple availability domains, load balancing, and RAC for HA, and can easily launch images for Oracle applications from within the OCI console. Having backup and disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud enables OMES to leverage Oracle Data Guard for data protection and disaster recovery, utilize familiar tooling that enables a faster setup of our DR environment, and integrate object storage for backup and archive. Extending our data center to the cloud allows the State of Oklahoma to connect its on-premises data center to cloud using VPN and have our choice of deployment options for hybrid environments. While Oracle relieves some of the workload by managing cloud processes for the state, OMES can take full advantage of all of this while still maintaining control over our PeopleSoft environment in-house.

For OMES, moving PeopleSoft to OCI increased both the pace of innovation and the value of IT spend. The State of Oklahoma is now able to launch and scale new applications more quickly with the on-demand infrastructure, which enables the team to increase focus on business and competitive differentiation instead of routine IT tasks and put control in the hands of users. With OCI, OMES reduced reliance on on-premises data centers, transitioned spend from fixed cost to paying only for what we consume, and gained the ability to increase capacity when demand spikes.

The State of Oklahoma’s final system sits with Oracle Managed Cloud Services. Here’s a breakdown of what that entails:

• Database management

  Space management, patching (reactive and proactive), capacity planning, performance tuning, remote monitor and manage events.

• Application management

  Patch management, instance activity, change control process, 24×7 incident management, improved end-to-end application availability.

• System and change management

  Instance startup and shutdown, intrusion detection, backups and refreshes, OS maintenance, upgrade patching, minor upgrades, unlimited change management.

Again, with Oracle being the manufacturer of all of these pieces, it makes it easy to have Oracle manage the entire technology stack sitting underneath the application.

The following breakdown shows what Oracle oversees for the state and what the state is responsible for overseeing with PeopleSoft running on OCI.

Oracle:

• Incident management
• Change management
  • Database and application patching.
  • Backup and purge.
  • Environment configuration changes.
  • Refresh environments.
• Capacity management
  • Administer database schema objects and tablespaces.
  • Monitor performance metrics and identify capacity issues.
  • Make configuration changes to maintain performance.
• Availability management
  • Analyze recurring unplanned outages and recommend improvements.
  • Monitor database and applications.
  • Respond proactively to threshold violations.
  • Configuration of monitoring events.
  • Provide historical data, such as operating system performance graphs.
  • Monitor non-production environments.

State of Oklahoma:

• PeopleSoft business processes.
• Running state government.
• Input and oversight over OCI.
• Focus on addressing business issues.