A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More
Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud. The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of … Read More
Cloud-First Applications at Harvard Business Publishing
Harvard Business Publishing is an organization responsible for strong corporate learning programs and prestigious publications such as the Harvard Business Review. M&S Consulting was tasked originally with performing a migration of HBP’s infrastructure from on-prem to the AWS cloud. The initial solution focused on a traditional lift-and-shift migration to get the HBP data and application infrastructure to the AWS cloud. M&S Consulting utilized infrastructure-as-code through AWS CloudFormation to build a repeatable, versioned infrastructure for the migrated applications. Once in the cloud, the solution focused on re-architecting and optimizing existing applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructure capabilities, as well as … Read More
University Leverages Free Cloud POC to Demonstrate Geographical Redundancy
A mid-sized public university, like many others, used their own on-prem data center for all data storage and backups. They were familiar with the flexibility that the cloud would provide, but they were hesitant to take the leap. They needed a solid business case and a way to ensure it would work in their environment. A series of events caused them to reevaluate their disaster recovery plan, which led them to quickly conclude that they needed additional capacity as well as geographical redundancy. The cloud seemed ideally suited to their needs, but they still needed to ensure it would work … Read More
Cloud POC Demonstrates value to government agency
A large government organization intended to use Oracle User Productivity Kit to create and publish training material. Unfortunately, the original procurement did not obtain the necessary hardware resources. After collecting requirements and working with cloud providers, our team was able to obtain operating credits for a proof of concept (POC) that would enable all required functionality and security. The POC was also able to deliver additional functionality, including single sign-on, virtual desktop infrastructure, and shared storage. We were able to demonstrate not only the effectiveness of a cloud architecture but also the reduction in implementation and maintenance costs. If you’d … Read More
Taking Advantage of Our Higher Education AWS Standard Plays (Begin Your Journey to the Cloud)
Is your institution moving to the cloud? Are you adopting a cloud strategy, such as Cloud First, where the institution takes the plunge and jumps in with both feet, or perhaps an Opportunistic Cloud or Experimental Cloud strategy where they test the waters with select projects? Perhaps your institution has instead elected to stay out of the cloud entirely and to simply watch from a distance. Each of these strategies can be appropriate in the right context, but adopting a cloud strategy that works for your institution should be a priority. With any of these strategies, you need to ensure … Read More
Does the SYS user really become inaccessible in Oracle Database running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
I had heard from a fellow DBA colleague that a known problem with Oracle Databases on AWS was that, in certain cases, the SYS user was not available to the DBA. Curious (and slightly alarmed), I did a little research online and discovered more than a few forum posts asking what to do about the apparent inability to execute common DBA tasks as SYS running Oracle Database on AWS. DBAs who were accustomed to being able to run DBMS_CRYPTO or install APEX from the command line were wondering how to get their work done in the cloud. In response, AWS had … Read More
AWS Standard Play Workshop at Bridgewater College
Bridgewater College took their first step to AWS by taking part in a new AWS program named, Standard Play. In 2018, AWS created the Standard Play program that provides a variety of workshops to help higher education customers take their first steps into the AWS Cloud. Bridgewater, in need of modernizing their website infrastructure, decided to focus on its main public-facing website for the pilot of the technology. As the AWS partner leading the Standard Play, M&S Consulting conducted a multi-day workshop to pilot the migration of Bridgewater’s website to AWS. M&S utilized infrastructure as code principals through CloudFormation to … Read More