To ensure Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) continues to deliver value, stay safe, and be optimized to support mission-critical capabilities, it needs to be updated to release 12.2. Simply put, and as we’ve stated in earlier EBS posts, upgrading to EBS R.12.2.X is a matter of when and not if.
Upgrading to Oracle EBS R12.2 helps EBS clients keep up with the rapidly changing business requirements of global scale that demand systems remain responsive, protected, and optimized. And with Oracle pulling the plug on Oracle Premier Support by December 2021 for EBS instances that are not on version 12.2.X, time is truly running out.
In the interest of further illustrating how important it is that you stay under Oracle’s support policy protection umbrella, this blog post will focus on the many benefits of staying on Oracle Premier Support for Oracle EBS and how upgrading as soon as possible will secure that protection.
Benefits of Oracle Premier Support
1. Maximizing Your investment
When it comes to industry-leading assistance, Oracle has built a comprehensive network of product support expertise that includes more than 12,000 global service specialists that span 175 countries. Oracle Premier Support provides you with health checks, patch, and maintenance advisors, product information centers, certification, Auto Service Requests, upgrade advisors, and much more.
Your EBS instance is the backbone of many, if not most, of your business-critical processes. For this reason alone, protecting your investment by staying on Oracle Premier Support is key to securing the optimal use and performance of your Oracle EBS. You can rely on the fact that Oracle Premier Support is the industry’s most comprehensive support coverage, ensuring your Oracle EBS continues to have new updates, fixes, and security patches delivered on a periodic basis.
Oracle Premier Support delivers comprehensive maintenance, features, and functionality for Oracle EBS. With Oracle’s Continuous Innovation model, your EBS can enjoy the benefits of new technologies, platforms, and functionalities you need to succeed without major, difficult upgrades. Going forward, Oracle will deliver new functionality to Oracle EBS periodically, allowing you to save time and money by controlling when you add new up-to-date features replacing time-consuming upgrades.
2. Increased Availability and Efficiency
Oracle has +40 years of delivering award-winning service. Oracle EBS clients look for reliability and a comprehensive environment where their businesses are not only reliable but can thrive while generating strong value through efficiencies and faster, reliable performance.
Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle’s commitment to customers through Continuous Innovation for Oracle EBS, where, in addition to Oracle’s comprehensive Oracle Lifetime Support Policy, Oracle EBS clients can take advantage of Oracle Premier Support for Applications Unlimited through at least 2032.
With annual reviews, Continuous Innovation releases like 12.2 are ongoingly supported and optimized.
With Oracle Premier Support, EBS instances can enjoy current support with current patches, ensuring that businesses can escalate as needed in a swift manner. Oracle Premier Support gives bug resolution that yields real fixes that aren’t simple workarounds. Instead, they are long-term solutions.
Service quality is a staple of Oracle Premier support, where you’ll get 24/7 technical support from Oracle experts. All in all, you get access to Oracle knowledge, community, and proven best practices, leveraging powerful proactive support tools including patch configuration recommendations.
3. Maximum Security
You’ve made a significant investment in your Oracle EBS, and Oracle Premier Support’s mission is to protect your investment, treating it as the critical element it is and ensuring your business maintains the availability of your Oracle EBS system and the business applications it supports.
In the past, we’ve faced real client scenarios where the upgrade has been delayed to a point that results in unwanted costs and security vulnerabilities that put their Oracle EBS in severe jeopardy. Some clients don’t fully realize how important it is to keep their Oracle EBS protected and productive by staying under Oracle’s support umbrella with Premier Support because as of now, their mission-critical operations are working just fine. While this may be the case (temporarily), another reality is that software is vulnerable and prone to cybercrime.
Cybercrime is real and it’s predicted to reach an estimated $10.5 trillion in annual costs of cybercrime damage worldwide by 2025. As of 2020, the Ponemon Institute estimated that the average cost of a data breach in the US was $3.86 million, and the average time to identify and contain a breach was of 280 days, siphoning millions of dollars out of organizations.
In fact, 52% of data breaches are mainly caused by malicious attacks. It’s worth noting that most mature organizations take prompt action to automate their security and incident response processes to prevent a large percentage of these breaches. Worth considering is that the cost of consequences of a data breach doesn’t stop once it’s contained; it can carry on for years following the initial event. If left unchecked and unregulated, your EBS system could be subject to costly attacks that could experience longtail losses, with the average data breach costs incurred in the first two years in regulated industries.
This is where Oracle Premier Support comes to the rescue for you.
Only Oracle Premier Support can deliver security enhancements and patches to the software itself, shrouding the environment with robust protection against new hacking threats, security vulnerabilities, and harmful malware. Oracle Premier Support prevention comes with critical patch updates, security alerts, and bulletins that further complement the suite of protective services under Oracle’s support umbrella.
Security patching is essential for securing enterprise software like Oracle EBS. If working on an unsupported version, your Oracle EBS is open to attack and your business open to risk. Oracle Premier Support is the only way to guarantee mission-critical security updates and protection for your Oracle EBS software.
Oracle creates and owns the source code, making it easy to identify and address vulnerabilities and emerging threats at the source level, providing reliable security updates on the go. To add to it, Oracle Premier Support delivers patches at every layer of the software stack, providing uniform, proactive, dependable, ongoing, and unparalleled protection to your Oracle EBS.
Stay on Oracle Premier Support. Take Action Now.
As stated earlier, Oracle Premier Support has an expiration date of December 2021 for clients who fail to upgrade to release 12.2. We can’t stress enough how important it is that you take action as soon as possible to ensure you meet this deadline and protect your investment.
With many factors to consider like CEMLI Remediation and preparing your database for the upgrade, it’s important that you act now and seek expert assistance to get the upgrade done in time and successfully.
There are multiple ways to go around getting started with the EBS upgrade to R12.2.X, whether you’re interested in a fully-staffed solution or in a resource-sharing model to split portions of the tasks with your internal teams, there’s the right solution for your needs.
If you want to learn more about the different Oracle support offerings available to you and why Oracle Premier Support is the best option for your Oracle EBS, download our ebook for more details.
Start the Oracle EBS upgrade today to protect your investment tomorrow.