In an interaction with CIOReview India, Srikanth D, VP-Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India expounds on why enterprises are betting big on hybrid cloud strategies, the challenges involved, and how to overcome them.

The hybrid cloud market worth is expected to reach USD 145 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 18.73%. How do you see this market evolving in India? What are the major factors driving the growth of this market?    

Cloud has all but becomes the foundation for innovation, and hybrid cloud environments are on the rise. Most forward-looking enterprises are actively crafting hybrid cloud strategies to accelerate growth recovery and improve business agility to sustain success in the new decade. It’s well-established that enterprises with a well-integrated and balanced hybrid cloud strategy are gaining greater business benefits than a piece-meal or fragmented approach to cloud.

Several of our enterprise customers are adopting a hybrid cloud approach to scale more quickly and effectively by taking advantage of the public cloud's innovative and flexible services. In summary, enterprises with a robust hybrid cloud strategy can help Indian enterprises gain superior cloud economics, greater regulatory compliance and improved business resilience.   

Building and managing a hybrid-cloud model comes with a unique set of challenges such as talent management, cost estimation, optimization and reporting, operational overhead, etc. How can they be addressed?

The onus is on cloud providers like Oracle to ensure our customers’ hybrid cloud journeys are smooth and effective. With the right hybrid cloud setup in place, enterprises should do less of managing IT - and more of innovating, focusing on their core business priorities. Oracle delivers the industry’s most secure, comprehensive and cost-effective hybrid cloud portfolio with autonomous capabilities, helping customers innovate more - and faster - with less resources.More and more Indian enterprises are tuning to Oracle to get their hybrid cloud journey right. So we are fully geared to address this rising demand for hybrid cloud services.

The Cloud skills gap is real and needs to be addressed on priority by the industry at large. For customers to be prepared for a cloud-first world, their internal IT teams as well as implementation partners need to have the right skills and expertise. As a responsible cloud provider, the onus is on us to help our partners and customers have the necessary wherewithal when it comes to cloud skills and capabilities. Thousands of companies and millions of users depend on OCI for running run their entire application portfolio including mission critical workloads. Further, OCI has emerged as one of the fastest growing cloud platforms globally, so there is an increased demand for OCI expertise worldwide. Recognizing this,we are offering free OCI training, plus free certification, via Oracle University until end of the year. We believe this will empower more technology professionals with career advancement by learning OCI for free with our expert-created training and globally recognized certification program.

Businesses want the flexibility to put their workloads wherever it makes the most sense according to their business requirements - whether in a public cloud, an on-premises data center, or at the edge. How can such flexibility be achieved in cloud adoption?

At Oracle, our hybrid cloud strategy is different vis-à-vis other tech providers.From the very beginning, we wanted to focus on addressing our customers’ requirements for location flexibility as well as control. At the same time, we wanted to deliver the same top-class, enterprise-grade performance, security and value akin to what we do with our public cloud. Therefore, we designed and developed our portfolio of cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge solutions in a way that helps customers move to the cloud at their own speed and comfort - whilemaking sure strict adherence to data residency and other regulatory requirements -with stringent IT SLAs in place.

Our key hybrid cloud offerings include:

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure: This is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) newest hybrid cloud offering. It brings core infrastructure services to the edge with what we call Roving Edge Devices (REDs) -these are ruggedized, portable, scalable server nodes. With this offering, we are helping enterprises with the capability to run cloud workloads wherever they need them -including the remotest locations globally.

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer: With this offering, enterprises gain exactly the same capabilities of a public cloud region,which are delivered inside their own premises. So essentially, enterprises will gain, in their own datacenters, the full set of modern cloud services we offer, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, superior price-performance benefits, and highest levels of security we offer inany of our public cloud regions.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution:This is one more recently introduced offering which a number of our Indian enterprise customers are appreciating. Initial customers include a number of large and mid-size banks. They have already started realizing the benefits of OCI’s dedicated, cloud-native VMware-based environment. This in turn, is enabling them with a high level of control while enhancing their scalability and costsavings.

Oracle ExadataCloud@Customer: Part of our proven Exadata family, this delivers high-performance data management capabilities directly to customers within their own data center. It delivers enterprises the advantage of operational management via an OCI-managed cloud service, whileat the same time, helping address requirements for strict data residency and security requirements by retaining data securely on-premises. Once provisioned, these databases remain fully operational even when they are disconnected from the cloud. In addition, optional Oracle Autonomous Database capabilities can help enterprises eliminate up to 80% of manual efforts needed for database operations. This is offeredwith an all-inclusive or bring-your-own license subscription model. And enterprises have the choice to scale up or down seamlessly as needed.

Oracle Exadata X9M next-generation: This is our newest offering in our hybrid cloud portfolio, available in the public cloud, cloud@customer (inside a customer’s datacenter, i.e. behind their firewall) as well as on-premises. With this new innovation, Indian enterprises can considerably improve their online transaction speed, analytics and performance, while decreasing costs by about 40 percent on average.

While organizations may feel strongly that hybrid-cloud architectures are the right choice, concerns remain about data protection, security, and compliance. How can organizations overcome these challenges?

At Oracle, security is in our DNA. We have securely managed the bulk of the world’s data, successfully, for four plus decades. So we have a fundamentally different approach to security. Because we believe security should be foundational and built in. And customers shouldn’t be forced into a situation where they have to make trade-offs between security and cost.

We believe it is important that we continuously enhance and expand our foundational security capabilities. We are focused on helping organizations reduce risk by providing a growing set of security capabilities that are simple, prescriptive, and integrated while keeping security as a design principle across OCI. Oracle has taken an integrated security services approach, which reduces the burden on our customers, enabling them to focus more time on improving their core business.

Simply out, we have a multi-layered approach to security. At the end of the day, we believe security should be easier to understand and implement for all employees, not just the security experts. In all our product innovations and approaches, we are focused on making security tools much easier to adopt - for example, by being always on, automated, and those that leverage AI and ML capabilities. Most security services are built-in and offered at no extra charge to our customers.

Further, Oracle has an extensive cloud compliance program designed to help customers operate globally in a complex and rapidly changing business and regulatory environment. Oracle manages more than 80 global, regional, and industry-specific programs to provide third-party attestations like SOC, ISO, HIPAA, and FedRAMP, and advisories for standards like GxP, NIST, GDPR and FISC.