Every enterprise cloud journey begins with the same uncomfortable question: what exactly do we have, and what will it really cost to move it? Most migrations stall not in the execution but in the discovery — incomplete inventories, unknown dependencies, guessed sizing and a business case built on optimism rather than evidence. The result is hidden costs, scope creep and cutover risk.
This is the problem the Matilda Cloud platform was built to solve, and the reason digi edZe has made it the automation engine at the heart of our OCI Migration Factory. Matilda is Oracle’s only funded third-party discovery and assessment solution for moving from other clouds or on-premises estates to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In this article we walk through the platform, its solution architecture, and how digi edZe wraps it into an end-to-end migration profile that takes a customer from a first day scan all the way to a fully operated, cost-optimized OCI estate.
Assessment Gaps Before Migration
Traditional tooling gives fragmented, limited visibility. Teams stitch together several point tools, someone is left responsible for making them interoperate, and the customer still has to optimize after the move rather than before. The purely manual alternative is slow, painful and error prone. Either way, the customer overpays and the project carries avoidable risk into cutover.
An AI-driven, single-platform approach changes the economics. Instead of interviewing application owners and trusting a stale CMDB, the environment is profiled automatically: assets, utilization, running services and inter-service communication are all discovered directly. That evidence base is what makes a credible TCO model, an accurate 7R disposition per workload, and a well-sequenced wave plan possible.
The digi edZe view: Assessment quality is the single biggest determinant of migration outcome. Get the discovery right and everything downstream — costing, sequencing, cutover, run-state — becomes a controlled, repeatable process rather than a series of surprises.
Our Four Pillar Matilda Suite
Matilda spans the full journey through four connected modules, so the same evidence flows from the first assessment through to steady-state operations without re-keying or tool hand-offs.
Rapid Assessment handles the cross-cloud case. Using either read-only APIs or exported billing files, it analyses AWS, Azure or GCP estate and produces a TCO comparison against OCI along with SKU-level detail to support a bill of materials. Setup is measured in minutes and results in hours rather than weeks.
Datacenter Assessment handles the on-premises case with an agentless scan across Unix, Linux and Windows. It captures system, service, network, storage and database detail, then derives end-of-support-life status, migration priority, migration strategy and right-sized target sizing — the four core assessment outputs a landing-zone design depends on.
Migrate / Modernize is the execution accelerator, moving workloads to OCI with block-level replication and the full range of 7R strategies, including containerization where modernization is warranted.
CloudOps closes the loop, keeping the new OCI environment optimal, secure and compliant — the pillar digi edZe delivers as a managed service, 24×7.
Solution Architecture
Matilda supports two deployment models so it can meet different data-residency and security postures. SaaS is preferred for most engagements for its speed and low overhead; a fully self-contained on-premises install suits enterprises with strict sovereignty requirements.
SaaS Deployment (recommended)
A lightweight collector is installed on a dedicated VM inside the customer network. It reaches targets agentlessly over SSH and WinRM, and transmits results to the Matilda SaaS platform where assessment and reporting run. It is the fastest to stand up and carries the lowest infrastructure footprint.
Hosted / On-Premises Deployment
For environments where no data may leave the customer boundary, the complete Matilda suite is installed inside the customer’s own environment. Collection, assessment and report generation all happen on premises. It carries a higher infrastructure investment in exchange for maximum control, and can be centralized or distributed regionally for large, multi-site estates.
Security Architecture
Security is designed in, not bolted on. Access to the platform authenticates against existing Active Directory or SAML for single sign-on, with Matilda’s own module managing users, roles and permissions and every API and GUI secured by default. Target credentials are held in a HashiCorp Vault-backed store, with integrations to CyberArk and Centrify for dynamic-password scenarios.
For discovery itself, Matilda connects targets over SSH (port 22) for Linux/Unix and WinRM (5985/5986) for Windows and uses standard database connection strings for schema-level database discovery. Only the required ports need to be reachable from the collector — a small, well-defined surface that is easy for a customer security team to review and approve.
Migration Network Architecture
During migration, a central portal server orchestrates replication servers that are spun up on demand in the target cloud. Block-level replication runs continuously over secured channels, low-cost replication instances are torn down when a sync completes, and cutover windows are kept short. The design keeps data flows predictable and the moving parts minimal.
Journey to OCI from Assessment to Becoming Cloud-Native
The four pillars line up into a single, continuous motion — connect and discover, map and analyze, plan and group, then execute and track. Because the same platform carries the data end to end, the plan that comes out of assessment is the plan that gets executed, and the run-state that follows is measured against the same baseline.
On the assessment side, a Rapid Assessment is initiated in a few guided steps: choose the customer and the source cloud, connect via API or import a billing export, name the assessment and run it. Within hours the platform returns an executive summary, a TCO calculation sheet with SKU detail, an asset inventory and a security and compliance report for API mode.
7R Strategies with the Right Disposition for Every Workload
A factory model only works if each workload is routed to the correct treatment. Matilda assigns one of seven dispositions to every application, from a straight rehost to a full rearchitect — and, importantly, to retire and retain decisions that take cost and risk out of scope entirely.
Under the covers, the Migrate module turns those decisions into action: assets are analyzed, grouped into waves and applications, infrastructure-as-code and install scripts are auto-generated, and the move is executed, tested and validated against OCI.
A disciplined five-stage cutover
Execution itself follows five well-defined stages — authentication, configuration, replication, testing and cutover — so that migration teams work to a consistent, auditable runbook on every wave rather than improvising per workload.
- Authentication — roles, permissions, user profiles and agent installation.
- Configuration — cloud profile, replication settings and launch settings.
- Replication — an initial full snapshot followed by incremental syncs.
- Testing — non-disruptive test cutover and validation before go-live.
- Cutover — final cutover with instance sizing, IP and security-group assignment, then source shutdown.
Shifting Towards Migration Profile in Digi edZe Way
A powerful platform is necessary but not sufficient. What customers actually buy is an outcome — a lower, funded bill; a clean, low-risk cutover; and an estate that keeps running well afterwards. digi edZe delivers that outcome by wrapping Matilda in a repeatable delivery model we call the 4D Migration Factory: Discover, Design, Deliver and Drive.
Measurable Payoff
The combination of automation and a disciplined factory model show up in the numbers reported across the Matilda and Oracle enablement material — faster moves, dramatically lower assessment cost, and better conversion from evaluation to committed migration.
In practice these translate into the outcomes customers care about: large-scale VMware estates moved to cloud-native with minimized downtime; financial institutions cutting three-year TCO while migrating dozens of applications across more than a thousand servers; and delivery teams that no longer need deep, scarce domain expertise on every engagement because the platform and the factory carry it.
Conclusion
If you are weighing a move to OCI whether from another hyperscaler or a data center you are trying to exit, the fastest way to replace guesswork with evidence is a Rapid Assessment. It is low-effort, low-risk and turns your real environment into a costed, sequenced plan within days.
Digi edZe brings the certified people, the factory model and the long-run managed services to turn that plan into a running, optimized OCI estate. Talk to our cloud advisory team about a funded assessment and a migration profile built around your environment.
