DAE Capital Goes ‘Cloud First’ on Microsoft Azure

DAE Capital is part of the Dubai Aerospace Enterprise Group. A top-tier aircraft leasing partner, DAE Capital owns and manages approximately 350 aircraft, serves in excess of 100 customers across 55 countries and has 140 employees across 6 office locations globally.

Becoming ‘Cloud First’ and Selecting Microsoft Azure

With a need to refresh and upgrade its data centre, DAE Capital guided by its core value of innovation and a drive to ensure the latest and most current technologies to support the business, took the decision to become a ‘Cloud First’ company, exiting its datacentre and migrating all its core business applications and financial system to Cloud.

In selecting the Microsoft Azure Cloud, three factors came into play:

• An existing application footprint already heavily invested in Microsoft technologies such as Office 365 and SharePoint
• Security and particularly the approach Microsoft take in making the security features that they employ themselves available to customer
• The follow-on services and out of the box features including those on the Microsoft Fast Track Program

Migrating Oracle to Azure Safely, Securely and Successfully

Customers looking to migrate Oracle workloads to Microsoft Azure typically face three key considerations:

• Licensing Impact: How are my licenses affected? Will I remain compliant? What is my license exposure?
• Oracle Support Position: Am I going to be supported? What about my existing support agreements?
• Performance and Availability: Can I architect for the same performance and availability as I have today? Can I do this without affecting my license and support position?

Version 1 has made a significant investment in tools, methodologies and IP, complemented by deep expertise in Oracle, Azure and software licence management. This all serves to alleviate concerns, mitigate risk and help realise the benefit of Azure for Oracle workloads.

Version 1 undertook a complex migration of DAE Capital’s entire Oracle estate including E-Business Suite Financials and Discoverer Reporting from its on-premise data centre to Microsoft Azure Cloud.

DAE Capital has users based around the world using these core financial systems every day in various time zones. The migration window was limited so Version 1 utilised a structured approach to workload migration to deliver a phased migration process and to ensure that we safely, securely migrated this core financial system to Azure with no user downtime. As part of the migration, Version 1 utilised the latest Oracle Identity Cloud Service to deliver seamless single sign-on capability for business users across the suite of business applications.

Outcomes

More than a transition to Cloud

• The migration project was not just an Oracle e-business suite project, Version 1 enabled DAE Capital to migrate every single workload to Microsoft Azure, with no unplanned downtime over seven months of transition.
• Re-architecting the on-premise solution, and introducing cloud services and PaaS, has allowed DAE Capital to reduce its Oracle footprint by nearly 50%, providing significant cost savings to the company.
• Launching a mobile app utilising Microsoft Azure mobile app service has given employees access to business systems 24/7 anywhere in the globe. These are features that would have been very difficult to produce had DAE Capital not moved to the Cloud.