Customer Success Story Windesheim

Business challenges

Windesheim is one of the largest Dutch universities of applied sciences and has branches in Zwolle and Almere. This university of applied sciences is known for its hands-on education and strong ties with the business community.

Windesheim uses the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to manage various business processes, including finance, projects, HR and procurement/inventory management. In 2021, in collaboration with MCX, they upgraded to Oracle EBS Release 12.2 on their own infrastructure (on-premise). In 2024, Windesheim's existing infrastructure landscape needed replacement and they decided to deploy the production Oracle EBS environment only as an archive database.

Why the choice of Oracle?

When investigating an infrastructure landscape replacement, the total cost of ownership (TCO) was carefully considered. Due to lower investments in physical hardware and maintenance costs, it was decided to house the Oracle EBS archive database in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As a result, Windesheim benefits from lower costs, better performance, improved security and less management burden, reducing the total cost of ownership.

Result

As we have supported the college for years with the technical management of the Oracle landscape and have the necessary expertise and certifications for OCI, Windesheim asked us to set up the OCI landscape and perform the migration of the Oracle EBS archive database to OCI. We did this with a smooth transition, minimal downtime and an infrastructure that matched Windesheim's requirements.

Logging into the OCI console uses Single Sign-On (SSO). The Identity Provider deployed by Windesheim for this purpose is Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory). This is a Cloud-based solution from Microsoft for identity and access management. Entra ID provides a secure and efficient way to manage users, grant access to applications and protect data within the Cloud environment. Users are automatically assigned within Windesheim via Entra ID.

By building the Oracle Cloud tenant completely from scratch, a landing zone for both the logical and technical architecture was implemented that was certified by the Center of Internet Security (CIS). By applying a hub-spoke implementation in Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs) and using appropriate ‘security lists’, segmentation was achieved. Different compartments were configured within Windesheim's Oracle Cloud tenant, each with a specific purpose.

For Windesheim, these three compartments are defined:

1.           Shared Resources

• This compartment contains resources shared by multiple systems or applications within Windesheim such as storage volumes, virtual networks and other generic infrastructure components.

2.           Network Components

• This compartment manages all network-related resources such as virtual private networks (VPNs), subnets, and network security groups. It ensures that the network infrastructure remains well separated from other resources, which is an advantage for security and scalability.

3.           Databases

• This compartment is specifically for database instances and related storage such as the Oracle EBS archive database. By placing the database in a separate compartment, Windesheim can optimally manage data access and security.

This layout allows for efficient organisation of resources, restricted access to sensitive data and components, and easy management and monitoring of different parts of the cloud infrastructure.

To host the Oracle EBS archive database, the Oracle Base Database Service within the Oracle Cloud was chosen. This choice provides a powerful and flexible solution for hosting databases in the Cloud.

The Oracle Base Database Service is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution specifically designed for running databases. This service offers the benefits of full database management capabilities without the need for infrastructure management. Below is a summary of the benefits:

1.           Management and maintenance

• Oracle manages the underlying infrastructure, patches, updates and backups, allowing Windesheim to concentrate on managing the data and applications themselves.

2.           Scaling

• The service provides automatic scaling of database capacity based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost control.

3.           Reliability and high availability

• Oracle Base Database Service provides built-in redundancy and recovery options, ensuring high database availability even in the event of failures.

4.           Security

• The service includes advanced security measures such as encryption of data at rest and in transit, as well as integration with Oracle Cloud's Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access management.

5.           Cost efficiency

• By using Oracle Cloud's optimised PaaS environment, the cost of infrastructure management, hardware and licences has been significantly reduced.

By hosting the Oracle-EBS database on the Oracle Base Database Service, Windesheim can benefit from a robust, scalable and secure Cloud environment optimised for running the Oracle EBS archive database.

Implementation

A DB system was created within the Oracle Base Database Service to house the Oracle EBS archive database. For the migration, a database link was set up over the Internet between the OCI archive database and the on-premises EBS database. Since Windesheim has a stable and fast internet connection, a separate OCI connection was not necessary.

To ensure consistency, the Oracle EBS application was temporarily stopped and the source EBS database was placed in read-only mode. A new pluggable database was then created within the Oracle EBS archive database, which was automatically populated with the Oracle EBS data via the database link. After the migration, encryption was applied to all created tablespaces, in line with security requirements within OCI.

The OCI DB system containing the Oracle EBS archive database was updated with the latest available Critical Patch Updates and backed up. As this is a consultation environment, the Oracle EBS archive database has also been placed in readonly mode.

To control costs, the DB system has been switched off, with Windesheim's approval. If necessary, it can easily be switched back on. MCX documented the procedure and transferred it to Windesheim. Finally, Windesheim phased out the original EBS database.