Oracle Cloud Delivers $2.5M Savings and 50% Faster Administration for Global IT Services Leader

Cognizant, a multinational technology and business services firm with approximately 318,400 employees across 48 countries and annual revenues exceeding $16.5 billion, faced escalating challenges with its on-premises financial data platform. Thousands of employees depended on financial analytics reports for critical decision-making, but the company struggled to deliver timely, secure, and visual analytics as data demands grew. The IT team spent significant time troubleshooting, tuning, and maintaining a disaster recovery environment, while scaling infrastructure required substantial upfront capital expenditures and lengthy procurement cycles. With underlying hardware approaching end-of-life, Cognizant recognized that cloud modernization was essential to sustain growth and operational efficiency.

Leveraging its existing Oracle Exadata relationship, Cognizant migrated its critical financial platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Exadata Cloud Service and deployed a new data warehouse using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. The migration leveraged Zero Downtime Migration technology to transfer terabytes of data without code modifications. Cognizant also adopted Oracle Analytics Cloud to replace its previous analytics solution, enabling users to extract and visualize data in context, and implemented OCI Identity and Access Management alongside Oracle Data Safe for granular access control and database security.

The migration delivered substantial financial and operational improvements. Cognizant reduced platform costs by $2.5 million over three years, while database administrators cut management overhead by 50% through Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse's self-management capabilities including auto-tuning, auto-backup, and automated patching. The IT team deployed a fully automated disaster recovery service using Autonomous Data Guard in less than a day, with individual failover setup completing in less than 8 minutes—compared to several hours previously—and executable by non-technical personnel. Beyond infrastructure gains, the several thousand analytics platform users gained access to enterprise-grade tools with built-in business models, enabling faster and more informed decision-making. OCI's layered security approach, including encryption key control and centralized audit logging, strengthened Cognizant's ability to protect sensitive financial data and manage hundreds of weekly role changes while maintaining row-level security compliance.