Cloud-Native Modernization of an Enterprise Planning System

Situation

OM Group moved an enterprise planning system off a costly legacy Oracle database and onto cloud-native Azure services, cutting data management costs by about 60% and reducing vulnerability mitigation time by 50%.

The system ran on an expensive, hard-to-maintain Oracle database hosted in Azure Gov cloud as infrastructure-as-a-service, an approach that no longer matched the service’s enterprise cloud direction.

Scope: Cloud-native modernization, development, and operations and maintenance for an enterprise planning and reporting system.

The Challenge

• High cost and complexity. Oracle maintenance was costly, and patching was difficult and irregular.
• Misaligned hosting. The IaaS deployment did not meet enterprise cloud directives.
• Manual data integration and reporting. Data from source systems were being imported manually. Reports were built in Excel spreadsheets, with no user-friendly data visualization.
• Heavy support load. Users generated a high volume of help desk tickets and service requests.

Our Approach

• One Agile team for build and run. Agile Scrum covered both development and operations and maintenance, so improvements and sustainment moved together.
• Re-hosted as PaaS in the enterprise cloud. We moved the application into the service’s Azure cloud environment and obtained its ATO as a platform-as-a-service deployment.
• Migrated with cloud-native tools. Azure Data Factory moved data from the legacy Oracle database to Azure SQL PaaS.
• Used log analytics to stay compliant. Log file analytics helped identify and reduce findings ahead of security control assessments.
• Replaced spreadsheets with dashboards. Power BI reporting gave users self-service data visualization.
• Trained every user role. Consistent, role-based training sessions helped each user group work confidently in the new system.

Results