Official documents disclose Oracle Cloud services "unspoken rules"

Analysts say many aspects of the official documentation of Oracle Cloud services, which contain policies and commitments, are in line with industry standards, but in some cases customers need to be highly aware.

The document was last updated December 1, and is marked as "confidential", although it is publicly available on the Oracle website. This document lists the rules that Oracle and its cloud customers must follow, in addition to the special terms that may exist in individual contracts. Oracle has launched a range of cloud services this year, including its http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/2014.html ">fusion applications and a PAAs (platform-Service), IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service) and social networking.

Ray Wang, chief executive officer and analyst at Constellation study, elaborated on his point of view after reading the document carefully. In many ways, he argues, Oracle's policies are in line with industry standards. However, customers should pay attention to other policies, such as in case of controversy or account violations, Oracle can close the account access. "Customers should be clear about the types of events that could lead to temporary shutdown of services, which is a potential problem, unlike the internal deployment software," Wang said. ”

Another analyst has expressed his point of view, said Frank Scavo, president and analyst at IT consulting firm Strativa, that Oracle's commitment 99.5% availability sounds good, but you need to understand that this is only for planned availability. For unplanned Downtime, Oracle lists a number of exceptions.

Oracle, for example, is clear that it will assume cloud security responsibilities, including system hardening, Scavo said: "But for the ' hacker or virus attack ' event, Oracle is a special case in its service level agreement. Behind the promise of usability, Oracle is looking for too many excuses. ”

Scavo also expressed disapproval of Oracle's apparent reluctance to allow customers to perform independent monitoring of their cloud services, stating in its policy document: "The exceptions here are Oracle Database cloud services and Oracle Java Cloud Services, or explicitly permitted services in an order file." ”

"Oracle's rationale here is to ensure that any monitoring tool does not negatively affect its cloud services," "However, this also seems to prevent customers from running a low impact automated script in their data center to connect to the cloud system to confirm the availability of the cloud system and to notify its customers when it is unavailable," he said. In my opinion, this policy is beyond the necessary level. Scavo added that clients should seek independent monitoring power when negotiating contracts.

Another surprise to Scavo is that Oracle has the right to perform "significant changes" to its cloud infrastructure two times a year. "Such a Change event is considered an established maintenance and may cause cloud services to be unusable for up to 24 hours," the document said. Scavo that customers with the most stringent requirements for high availability should pay special attention to this provision.

For customers, Scavo said, the smart move was to make it clear in the contract that Oracle would be subject to some agreed penalties if it failed to meet its service availability commitments.

Many Oracle Fusion applications early adopters are ready to choose cloud deployment, partly because of the high complexity of installing within an enterprise.

Oracle has taken a cautious approach to selling fusion, telling customers who are running their e-business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft applications to deploy new software at their own pace.

Given the enormous amount of effort Oracle has put into developing fusion applications, it seems obvious that over time Oracle wants to move most of its installations to fusion. As a result, Oracle's cloud services policy will become more stringent.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment. (邹铮 Compilation)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)