Image: Oracle

Oracle introduced a service that it said could take some of the biggest pain points out of migrating from physical data centers to cloud-hosted environments. Called Oracle Cloud Lift Services, it’s available now at no additional cost, the company said.

Cloud Lift is designed to accelerate migrations and act as a “seamless path to the cloud,” said Oracle Cloud Infrastructure SVP Vinay Kumar. In essence, it “provides a single point of contact for all technical delivery and removes critical expertise barriers for adoption of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services,” Oracle said.

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One of the most frequently cited barriers to adopting cloud infrastructure is a lack of necessary skills, which Cloud Lift is specifically designed to eliminate by pairing customers with Oracle cloud engineers and technical services “for activities ranging from performance analysis, application architecture, hands-on migrations and go-live support,” the company said.

OCI experts are accessible to companies planning to migrate beginning at the inception of migration projects and continue to provide support through assessment, prototyping, migration and eventual management of OCI services.

New customers who opt to use Cloud Lift Services work with Oracle engineers during their contracting process “to create and agree on a documented work plan which lays out the specific eligible workloads, timelines, and other details,” Oracle said in its Lift FAQ document. Existing customers can make use of cloud-based optimization services from Oracle and its service partners.

There are limits to how much a business can get out of Cloud Lift. Oracle describes it as designed to migrate up to 10 Oracle databases and Oracle apps (both cloud-native and high-performance computing-based). Not included in Cloud Lift’s offerings are migration for more than 10 services and “complex migrations involving new business logic, platform upgrades, or custom development.”

Oracle also describes the service as ideal for some customers, but not for others. For those uses, it said working with a migration partner is ideal. The circumstances in which Cloud Lift is ideal include migrating only a few applications directly to the cloud, migrating apps that don’t need to be updated to new software versions, needing help to configure OCI services, and for those that need reviews of network configuration and security as well as needing basic OCI training.

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Companies that should seek migration assistance elsewhere include those that are migrating a large number of apps or apps that need software upgrades as part of the migration, companies that plan to update business logic as part of the migration, companies re-platforming or re-architecting solutions or developing AI/ML models, those using hybrid or multicloud architecture, those migrating OBIEE or Essbase solutions and those developing new applications.

Oracle describes several major organizations, such as Cargill, the Seattle Sounders FC and Rice University, as having used Cloud Lift, but it seems from the product description that users with complicated needs may still need to seek help from a third-party service.