Sculptor trusts OCI to support financial operations and disaster recovery
Asset management firm migrates PeopleSoft to OCI and adopts Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery for greater scalability and resiliency of operations.
“When Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery was brought to my attention, I thought ‘This is perfect!’ Our DR plans always lived in spreadsheets and documents, and it was unclear what to do if a real disaster actually occurred. Now the configuration lives right within the cloud infrastructure we’re running on and can be executed easily.”
Business challenges
Sculptor Capital Management is a leading global alternative asset manager that combines deep expertise with swift action to put client outcomes first. With offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, Sculptor provides investment opportunities in all major geographies across credit, real estate, and multi-strategy platforms.
Sculptor requires robust accounting and finance systems and reliable reporting, and it used Oracle PeopleSoft on-premises as the core of its financial operations for 15 years. The application and its supporting Oracle databases served the organization well and leaders were happy with the success, but they realized a change was needed to enhance flexibility and resiliency.
Keeping this environment available was essential, but maintaining on-premises servers was costly and time-consuming. There were concerns about outages, and getting on-premises servers up and running again could take hours or days.
Moreover, Sculptor’s on-premises disaster recovery plan was manual and decentralized across numerous spreadsheets and documents, with no clear line of execution if something were to occur.
With our DR orchestration living within OCI, I feel more comfortable than I ever have in the past that if we have to execute a switchover or failover, we can do so reliably.
Why Scupltor chose Oracle
Recognizing that a move to the cloud would address its existing on-premises concerns, Sculptor decided to migrate its Oracle PeopleSoft and supporting Oracle databases to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The migration was seen as a natural fit because of the firm’s years of achievements with Oracle technology. By running its existing environment on OCI, Sculptor would gain the enhanced security and availability needed to support ongoing business operations while eliminating the manual upkeep of on-premises servers. OCI would also provide greater flexibility by dynamically scaling resources up and down to meet demand and offer the ability to start new developments faster without any impact to business users.
Sculptor also saw immense value in adopting Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery, which would organize and simplify disaster recovery operations within the OCI console for faster execution and up-to-date procedures.
By moving Oracle PeopleSoft and disaster recovery operations to OCI, Sculptor achieved a more resilient financial landscape and a simplified, fully automated disaster recovery strategy.
Results
After Sculptor’s PeopleSoft environment was migrated to OCI, the various finance teams saw no change in the way they worked or the processes they followed, allowing financial operations to continue running smoothly. On the back end, the firm eliminated the need to invest in depreciating hardware or assign IT staff to maintain aging servers. By moving to a secure, high-performing cloud architecture in OCI, Sculptor increased the availability of its Oracle PeopleSoft environment and mitigated the risk of outages.
OCI provided on-demand scalability, allowing the firm to dynamically scale cloud resources up or down. On-premises, it would take Sculptor weeks to requisition a new server and have IT implement it. Now, compute power is automatically tuned to meet business demand, giving the firm more control over costs.
Sculptor also gained the ability to respond to business needs more rapidly. For example, creating a copy of a production environment used to be a lengthy process conducted overnight so it didn’t interfere with ongoing operations. Now, Sculptor can create a fully ready test environment in minutes to experiment, fix production issues, and work on development without any impact to operations, even during peak business hours.
A critical area to address was the company’s decentralized disaster recovery plan. By implementing Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery, the firm established a fully automated disaster recovery process within the OCI console that can be executed with a single click. Removing manual intervention from operations eliminated the risk of human error, which in turn reduced recovery time objectives—the time it takes to restore an application after an unplanned disruption. The service provided a single view of operations, including prechecks, execution, and monitoring. In addition, Sculptor’s disaster recovery plan will automatically stay up-to-date, bringing peace of mind that vital PeopleSoft applications will remain resilient.
About the customer
Sculptor Capital Management is a leading global alternative asset management firm that provides investment products in areas such as multi-strategy, credit, and real estate.