This is Part 1 of a two-part blog covering Oracle licensing tools and best practices.
Oracle produces a number of very good enterprise technologies, particularly their Database and related Technology stack of products. Companies of all sizes have been running their most business-critical systems with Oracle technologies, even if the cost of running the platform has been close to 30% or more of a company’s IT budget.
Over the past five or more years, Oracle’s licensing and audit practices have not been on par with the quality of their technologies (see a guest blog by attorney Pam Fulmer of Tactical Law Group @ https://houseofbrick.com/seeking-to-dismiss-sunrise-firefighters-complaint/). The Cloud has also disrupted how companies can deploy Oracle or alternative platforms for greater flexibility and sometimes better licensing options.
The key to better Oracle licensing comes down to two words – Compliance and Governance.
House of Brick, the OpsCompass Global Services division (https://opscompass.com), has worked with a number of clients over the past several years to assist with Oracle licensing. This has included everything from license compliance assessments to full entitlement & deployment governance. The following are common client scenarios around Oracle licensing, the challenges that Oracle’s aggressive licensing and audit practices present, and the best-practice use of tools and services to maintain compliance through good governance.
Oracle License Compliance Assessment (Single Use)
One of our clients at House of Brick had recently acquired another company. This other company had its own data centers which also hosted Oracle technologies, including a disaster recovery (DR) site. The client had a master agreement with Oracle that allowed them to license Oracle database and related technologies by processor. The acquired company also had an agreement with Oracle and had a mixture of different license types.
The client wanted to validate the license compliance of their combined organizations. The parent company had virtualized their data centers, including Oracle workloads. The acquired company had a smaller Oracle footprint which was running on physical infrastructure – no virtualization. The combined direction was to move to a private cloud model that was fully virtualized and automated, including high availability and disaster recovery for Oracle and all workloads.
The CIO was concerned that she could be out of compliance because of the acquisition. She wanted to quickly validate her options to make sure she could both afford Oracle licensing in a private cloud model as well as be defensible for any potential audit.
House of Brick has helped many clients like this with an Oracle license compliance assessment. This engagement includes use of our Database Compliance Module of the OpsCompass software. This tool can be used for a single instance, like an assessment, to validate a client’s Oracle deployments against their contractual entitlements. The assessment also includes consulting services that review Oracle contract documents and advise the client on their best Oracle license options based on these findings, and their business and IT strategies.
In the case of a client like this, a private cloud model using Oracle processor licensing can be architected and deployed to align the cloud strategy to the terms and conditions of the parent company’s Oracle agreement. The deliverables include a snapshot of the current deployment environment and an optimized design of the future deployment architecture to help assure license compliance. The assessment report provides further recommendations, based on the Oracle usage findings from the OpsCompass software, that can help to optimize the Oracle deployment and even reduce ongoing license and support costs.
Part 2 will further outline Monthly Monitoring and Annual Service use cases of other House of Brick clients. Please check back soon for the next post on Oracle licensing tool best practices.
In the meantime, please visit https://houseofbrick.com/expert-services/compliance-governance/ for any questions on Oracle license compliance & governance.
To contact House of Brick directly, please go to https://houseofbrick.com/contact/
