The cloud is our greatest weapon when faced with disruption
- 29 September 2020
By Richard Petley, SVP UK and Ireland
As new challenges arrive every day, some of the most important questions for business leaders are these: What will it take to compete? And what decisions do you need to take today, to fare better tomorrow?
For many, the answer lies in digital transformation. For the Ministry of Defence (MoD), its digital transformation team, Defence Digital, is making Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) the latest available weapon in its multi-cloud armoury. Why? The team don’t want to react to the changing world around us. They want to lead that change.
By integrating OCI into its multi-hybrid suite of services, the MoD has the flexibility to run its cloud how it sees fit. The team can take advantage of the various innovations that different cloud vendors bring to the table. Bringing different clouds together means organisations can make the most of their data – their most critical asset – all within a highly compliant environment.
For the MoD, this ‘information advantage’ – ensuring they have critical information before they need to know it – not only sets them apart, it ensures they can be as resilient as possible when faced with the unforeseen. As such, we’ve seen many customers turn to the cloud this year.
Zoom moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure a few months ago, to support its unforeseen growth as the world went into lockdown. Its business was evolving, seeing the most significant growth ever, and its cloud needed to evolve along with it. OCI enabled Zoom to scale its capacity quickly – in just nine hours, in fact – to help meet the needs of the millions of new users. Now, it is transferring seven petabytes of data through OCI every single day.
Similarly, 8x8 faced the same problem: an unforeseen hike in video call users means more demand on its infrastructure. Managing to scale from 200,000 monthly users to 20 million in just a few weeks requires cloud infrastructure that can meet these needs – without the cost and performance headaches that scaling up so quickly usually brings. By moving its video meetings services from AWS to OCI, 8x8 is actually saving 80% on network outbound costs, thanks to our strong price-performance ratio. Now, the company can keep growing while still delivering for its users.
The last few months have led to countless organisations re-evaluating their cloud infrastructure needs. We’re having conversations every day with companies who need to scale, without sacrificing on spend or security, and become more resilient too. This is exactly where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure comes in, and where it is helping businesses succeed.
This is vital, because none of us can predict what’s around the corner – I certainly wouldn’t want to try. But what’s absolutely imperative is that we have technology that can help us cope with these new demands – this is what the MoD, Zoom and 8x8 have all set in stone.
We’ve been focused on this for decades at Oracle, and our customers are too. Faced with continuing disruption, customers realise the urgent need for cloud – and the business resilience that comes with it.