HGS Digital

Our partnership with Oracle and Amazon Web Services


Oracle, AWS, and HGS Digital: a match made in heaven—or at least in the cloud

We provide support and peace of mind as you embark on your Oracle-AWS transformation

Some of today’s largest, most complex, enterprise web applications, portals, and websites are powered by Oracle and AWS. These highly scalable tools have proven time and time again that they can improve business agility, increase productivity, and transform companies into interactive, social businesses. By moving Oracle workloads to AWS, you can scale capacity up and down on demand as needs change, only paying for what you need, when you need it.

Fundamental, customer-facing, mega-transformations don’t happen often. Even the most sophisticated and skilled in-house IT teams may need guidance and reassurance to ensure their projects on Oracle and AWS are set up for long-term success. This is where HGS Digital comes in.

The HGS Digital team has helped many clients successfully migrate and manage Oracle workloads on AWS over the past decade. We can guide you through the initial decision-making phase all the way to launch, maintenance, and optimization. Whether you need help with strategy, migration, monitoring, ongoing management, or developing your team’s skillsets to take the next big cloud step, our Oracle on AWS competencies can provide peace of mind.

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HGS Digital’s long-standing partnership with AWS and Oracle

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We have a history of driving value with AWS-Oracle solutions

HGS Digital has been partnering with Amazon Web Services since 2008. At that time, we started to see a rise in the number of clients wanting sizable IT improvements, and we answered with cloud.

Our initial cloud practice involved providing hosting services for our joint Oracle clients using WebCenter Content, WebCenter Portal, and WebCenter Sites. The HGS Digital team began implementing Oracle WebCenter Sites in 2003 when it was owned by FatWire.

In addition to Oracle implementation services, we leveraged Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for IaaS to host the workloads. We were among the first to offer a hosted option for these solutions, which gave us a real edge over our competition and strengthened our partnerships with both Oracle and AWS.

We began offering migration and fully managed services to better serve at both the application and infrastructure levels. As these solutions gained momentum, our clients began to see the value of Amazon EC2 instances paired with our offerings. We started winning additional workloads beyond just WebCenter Sites, spurring the growth of our overall cloud business.

Reduce the stress of your next Oracle-AWS application, portal, or website project

Our strategy services, implementation services, migration services, managed services, and IaaS (hosting) with 24/7 monitoring service provide you with not only total cost of ownership reductions, but with a single source for contracting and support. Our array of services can free up your IT resources, reduce your development cycles, and improve your speed to deployment, all backed by the AWS guarantee of 99.99% uptime.

By working with HGS Digital, you can address key business challenges, including growth management, workload fluctuation, database performance, business and security risks, proper governance, and budget adherence. HGS Digital can help you:

  • Review, audit, and optimize Oracle licensing
  • Understand the costs of moving Oracle workloads to the cloud
  • Validate the process with the migration of a pilot workload into production in AWS
  • Prepare a full roadmap for the rest of your Oracle databases and applications

Comparing on-prem versus cloud databases may help

For decades, hosting databases on-prem was the norm. As the need for wider access grew, organizations started adding extra, new on-prem IT to give this flexibility for disparate workers, which increased risk and the number of technologies that needed to be managed. Now at a breaking point, more and more organizations are exploring cloud-based options.

Classic on-prem model

  • Difficult to scale infrastructure in real-time
  • Structured and unstructured data constraints
  • Licensing and upgrading are cumbersome
  • Parallel data centers double the cost of disaster recovery
  • Real-time monitoring, alerting, and SLA management need constant vigilance

Modern cloud model

  • No upfront hardware and licence costs; cloud is pay-as-you-go
  • Bring-your-own licence is possible
  • Fully managed, auto-scaling capabilities
  • Minimal infra-management overhead
  • Storage expansion requires zero downtime
  • Faster disaster recovery with control over resources

Migrating your Oracle database from on-prem to AWS involves three main steps

Step 1: Strategy and pilot

  • Typically a 3-week engagement
  • Define business and technical goals
  • Identify pilot workload for migration
  • Migrate pilot workload into production
  • Determine next steps

Step 2: App and data migration

  • Prioritize app and database migration order
  • Define success metrics
  • Reengineer applications as needed
  • Create and use automated migration scripts/tools
  • Plan for contingencies and rollback
  • Migrate remainder iteratively

Step 3: Transition and optimize

  • Onboard any necessary monitoring, support, and management tools
  • Automate elastic scaling of database
  • Implement security model and monitoring
  • Optimize performance and cost
  • Optimize usage based on demand

Let us help you modernize your on-prem Oracle databases and apps with AWS

Managed AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle databases

  • Best when: Need to free up database administrator (DBA) time to do more strategic work.
  • Advantages: AWS manages and scales the database so your team can focus on app development; easy setup.
  • Cost impact: Can transfer on-prem Oracle licences; pay-per-use (hourly) service.

Self-managed Oracle databases on AWS EC2 instances

  • Best when: Have DBA skillset in-house and/or want to replicate the on-prem setup in the cloud.
  • Advantages: Development and DBA teams gain greater control over app and database administration.
  • Cost impact: Fixed cost (similar to on-prem) and independent of usage; offers bring-your-own licence; additional cost for disaster recovery setup.

Migrate to AWS Aurora database

  • Best when: Need to reduce database cost and/or limited DBA skillset in-house.
  • Advantages: Cloud-optimized database; supports high availability and addresses challenges in your current database setup.
  • Cost impact: Depends on the usage, but offers pay-per-use model.

Self-managed Oracle database on VMware Cloud on AWS

  • Best when: Already running VMware on-prem.
  • Advantages: Faster migration to the cloud (VMware to VMware); supports complex architectures, such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
  • Cost impact: Can be expensive but in alignment with complex architectures.
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We specialize in AWS

We offer a qualified team of Amazon-certified cloud consulting experts with proven capabilities in leveraging the AWS environment to reap business benefits. We have achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner status in recognition of our ability to help clients architect, deploy, and manage AWS deployments.

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