Dar Al Dawa synchronizes data 75% faster, cuts costs by 90% using OCI

With Oracle E-Business Suite as its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application running on an on-premises Linux server, Dar Al Dawa struggled with sustaining daily operations. The expensive hardware updates performed poorly, so the company looked for an infrastructure solution with on-demand scalability that would support its critical business applications.

Due to the insufficient bandwidth and poor input/output performance, the company’s sales representatives spent too much time synchronizing data, while the company incurred high costs to get data in and out of its systems.

Lengthy data backups and recovery processes also caused business disruptions. With multiple database instances, including a dedicated instance for reporting, Dar Al Dawa struggled to ensure end-to-end data security. This led the organization to look for a database with comprehensive security features, such as encryption and data masking, which would reduce the risk of a data breach and decrease the time required for data backups and recovery. The company also hoped to reduce total cost of ownership and enhance decision-making processes through enhanced reporting capabilities.

Dar Al Dawa moved its EBS workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) after running a proof of concept for one of its core applications. As a long-time user of Oracle products, OCI was the natural choice for the organization because it provided higher performance, essential for supporting the company’s performance-hungry applications.

The lower total cost of ownership was another factor behind the organization’s decision to migrate its workloads to OCI. Additionally, OCI’s extensive security features were a major consideration in the company’s decision to choose OCI.

By migrating EBS to OCI using Oracle Cloud Lift Services, Dar Al Dawa increased the reliability and performance of its critical business applications by orders of magnitude. Dar AL Dawa also migrated its CRM application using MS SQL running on Windows from Azure to OCI, in addition to moving E-Business Suite ERP to OCI.

Using the elastic computing capabilities provided by OCI Block Storage, the company substantially increased database performance. Tapping the low latency and high bandwidth of Oracle Cloud, the company’s sales representatives now spend 75% less time synchronizing data. Sales activities, such as visits to physicians and pharmacies, are faster.

The organization uses Oracle Recovery Manager as a foundation for backing up and recovering 1.2 terabytes of data stored in Oracle Database on OCI. Previously, poor network bandwidth and storage throughput caused disruptions in daily operations. Today, backups take 45 minutes compared to more than 6 hours before.

The pharmaceutical manufacturer performs automated, scheduled backups and retains the data based on its backup policy, thanks to OCI Block Storage. Incurring high input/output costs for keeping 5 terabytes of critical data archived on third-party storage, Dar Al Dawa turns to OCI Archive Storage to ensure data availability at a tenth of the previous cost—US$7 as opposed to US$70 per month.

By storing multiple data copies across multiple availability domains in the Oracle Cloud region in Frankfurt—storage servers with built in-repair mechanisms between Oracle data centers—the company protects against data loss and increases business responsiveness.

OCI Virtual Cloud Network helps the organization protect critical workloads in its cloud networking environment with isolated network virtualization. The virtual cloud network helped the company increase end-to-end security and decrease the risk of a network breach by prohibiting specific server instances from having public IP addresses.

With OCI Flexible Load Balancer, the pharmaceutical manufacturer automatically routes traffic across multiple fault domains to increase the availability of its performance-demanding applications, including during peak times. By applying and reinforcing OCI Web Application Firewall protection on its flexible load balancer for both private and public instances, the company protects its external and internal application workloads. In addition, Oracle Cloud Guard helps Dar Al Dawa safeguard its network by continuously monitoring and detecting potential security threats. This provides quicker reaction times for mitigating security risks as well as better management of IT resources.

Dar Al Dawa worked with the cloud specialists from Oracle Cloud Lift Services—a free service for Oracle customer tenancies—to plan and manage the migration to OCI. Oracle Cloud Lift Services completed the process in just ten days without causing any disruptions.

“Oracle Cloud Lift Services’ expertise stems from their extensive experience with OCI. They took all responsibility for managing our entire migration process. It was an excellent experience,” says IT Director Ziad Yousef.