Get ready old-G (OCI Gen 1) Oracle EPM Cloud subscribers- you are moving down the street to the next-Gen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure!
Using a software-as-a-service tool like Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) takes away the complexity of servers, networks, operating systems, and upgrades to the infrastructure that runs your applications. Well, Oracle is ready to give all of you early Oracle EPM Cloud adopters a [Christmas 🎁] significant infrastructure upgrade as part of your subscription. If you choose the Oracle-managed option, it’ll be mostly a non-event.
TL;DR: If you don’t do anything, starting in April 2023, Oracle will begin migrating Oracle EPM applications to new data centers. At a minimum, your admin must configure single sign-on in the new environment before your migration.
What’s happening?
Oracle EPM Cloud came out in 2014, hosted in Oracle’s original public cloud data centers called OCI Gen 1 (for the purposes of this article). For the next six years, if you subscribed to Oracle EPM Cloud, your application got set up in one of these original Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Gen 1 data centers. For the past two years, if you were a new subscriber, Oracle hosted your EPM applications in an OCI Gen 2 data center. Finally, Oracle is ready to wind down EPM on OCI Gen 1 and will migrate customers starting in April 2023.
Why should I care about Gen2?
Like all things in tech, it's better, faster, and more secure.
As a user, it’s not that exciting!
As a client administrator, there are several techie benefits that stand out:
I’ve heard that EPM on OCI Gen 2 is about 30% faster.
If you are programming against the REST APIs, EPM on OCI Gen 2 supports OAuth2 tokens for authentication.
You can have more than one SAML 2.0 identity provider.
Self-service access to the EPM backup repository – 60 days for production and 30 days for test.
Ability to configure domain keys (DKIM) authentication for outgoing emails – will prevent emails coming in from the Oracle EPM Cloud from getting stuck in your spam filters.
Will I be impacted?
If you use Oracle EPM Cloud on OCI Gen 1, then YES! (If your EPM URLs contain US1, US2, or US6, you are in a Gen1 datacenter.)
What are my options?
Oracle provides two choices: Customer Managed Migration or Oracle Managed Migration.
With the Customer Managed Migration, you submit an SR to Oracle with a CSV file that maps your existing instances to your new desired data center, along with the administrator’s email. Oracle will set up the new environments, and then it's on your team to migrate content over. In simple terms, you need to configure the instances, set up your identity provider, and clone your applications over to the new environment. When ready to switch over, communicate the new URLs to your users.
With the Oracle Managed Migration, it’s all SaaS… this migration is intended to be transparent and will happen during your monthly maintenance window. When your scheduled migration hits, your OCI Gen 1 environment will be cloned to OCI Gen 2, and the URLs will be rerouted for end-users. Oracle will notify customers in waves, with the first wave starting in April 2023. When you receive your notification, Oracle will have configured new instances in an OCI Gen 2 data center. You have two months to test, with the option of deferring for two additional months using the skipupdate process.
Where can I read more?
Oracle announced the migration to OCI Gen2 in the 22.11 release notes and is thoroughly discussed in the Operations Guide.
About David Pabst CPA & Oracle ACE Pro
David Pabst CPA/CITP & Oracle ACE Pro is a thought leader and solutions consultant focused on empowering startups to Fortune-100 orgs to employ the Oracle EPM Cloud to make their organizations nimbler. David recently wrote The Nine Principles of Agile Planning: Create Nimble and Dynamic Forecasting in Your Organization, available at major booksellers.