By: Deepu Balaji, Senior Specialist, LTIMindtree

Cloud is quite a buzzword these days. From business to personal activities, it is becoming an integral part of life. Whether you open a document on Google Docs or store your photos on iCloud or Google Drive, you are deploying the cloud.

Let us explore what cloud means at an enterprise application level. Cloud computing has indisputable advantages despite drawbacks. Here we explore the possibility of having the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system of PeopleSoft on the cloud.

For an end-user, PeopleSoft is just another website dedicated to their business process, which they access over the web. It does not matter whether they are accessing it from an on-premises data center or halfway across the country. In fact, it makes PeopleSoft an ideal candidate for cloud. A decision to implement an enterprise-wide application like PeopleSoft eliminates many pain points for businesses. Here are some advantages:

Shorter procurement cycle

A long procurement cycle is one of the key factors that act as a challenge for businesses when they decide to implement an enterprise-wide application. Such implementation needs provisioning like infrastructure, security, and an application support team. Even more complex, the steps need to be repeated for each change/increase in infrastructure.

With the implementation of PeopleSoft on the cloud, all these challenges can be eliminated. In fact, resources can become available as needed within hours of your requesting them! We are talking about months of effort if you are opting for an on-premises environment. This will be a huge deciding factor for fast-growing small/medium companies which do not have a robust IT infrastructure team.

Dynamic Provisioning

An on-premises system is usually over-designed in anticipation of the following:

• Potential capacity increase in the future
• Addressing development
• Quality assurance needs

This might lead to a huge waste of resources. Also, we might have to provide additional test environments just for the implementation/upgrade, which might not be used after go-live. With PeopleSoft on the cloud, adding/removing a new environment will be as easy as a few clicks.

Resilience

A system is designed with the idea that it is expected to fail – hardware failure, software bug, configuration issue, external attack, etc. The idea is to recover from failure with the least downtime. An on-premises system failure is handled case-by-case. But when PeopleSoft on cloud is hosted by a reputed provider, you have the assurance of their dedicated load-balancing and recovery procedure with the highest SLAs, resulting in a highly resilient system.

Disaster recovery

This follows from resilience, but disaster recovery (DR) has grown into a specialty of its own to be discussed separately. On all cloud models, disaster recovery is built into the system with data redundancy to ensure the high availability of the system and is guaranteed by the SLA.

Latest software and hardware

All software and hardware have end-of-life (EOL) dates, after which they will no longer be supported. You are forced to replace/upgrade them or face enormous maintenance costs. This will entail going through all the steps in the procurement cycle if you have an on-premises application. With the cloud, upgrading a platform instance to a new instance is just a click away.

High availability

All cloud platforms promise high uptime. And with PeopleSoft being a business-critical enterprise application, the availability is much higher, often upwards of 99 percent.

Unlimited environments
In enterprise-wide applications, we may want to provision a new instance quite fast. For instance, when we are testing some integration with another system without having to impact the current test environment. On-premises environments are rigid and take too long to provision. On the cloud, you can create the test environment and clone your production database quickly and easily.

Flexibility

The flexibility offered by the cloud is unmatched. For example, you can design your system to have the application hosted on-premises with the back system on the cloud. Also, you can have your production instance on-premises and development/testing instance on the cloud.

Security

Having PeopleSoft on the cloud does not mean all your enterprise data is accessible over the Internet. For added security, the PeopleSoft application can be deployed in a virtual private cloud (VPC) connected to the business’ data center, bypassing the public Internet. And if we are talking about physical security, cloud providers have it covered with their secure data centers.

The last but not the least benefit is that PeopleSoft on Cloud lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO). This is applicable if you are planning to move your existing application to the cloud or if you are a new customer implementing the system on the cloud from scratch.

Cloud Challenges

Speed
Though it is advantageous to access your application over the web, it might also adversely affect the speed of the application, especially in enterprise-wide applications. An on-premises implementation of an enterprise-wide application will usually be limited internally to the company over LAN. This will be faster than the cloud, where we will have to factor in WAN and consider the increased number of networks over which the data travels. So, for obvious reasons, the time required to access a resource over WAN will be higher than accessing it in your local machine or company network, depending on how much a customer is willing to spend for WAN bandwidth.

Compliance

For international companies, there might be extra considerations based on legal and data compliance. It is essential to plan whether to have the data domestically or internationally, especially for critical enterprise-wide applications like PeopleSoft.

Reskilling

There will always be new tools (generally easy and intuitive) to support the application on the cloud. For example, in Oracle, we have Oracle Cloud Manager. However, remember that these are not development tools and do not necessarily need a technical resource to support them.

Available Options *

* The databases mentioned here are those supported by PeopleSoft. Other databases may be supported by the cloud provider but are incompatible with PeopleSoft.

* The list is not exhaustive as more databases are added by cloud providers.

Success Stories

While PeopleSoft customers are increasingly opting for the cloud, the decision, cost, and approach will vary for each customer. And in some cases, it might not even be the cost of ownership but the benefits of the cloud that drive the decision. Here are a few success stories from Oracle Cloud.

*References:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E52319_01/infoportal/opc.html

Conclusion

Considering the trend, it is safe to assume that many more clients will be opting for cloud infrastructure for hosting PeopleSoft applications. It improves operational efficiency, reduces costs and automates lifecycle management in the future. LTIMindtree, as a solution provider, should push or at the least provide the option to the client on the emerging trends in the packaged software of PeopleSoft.