You hold Oracle licences with no active support agreement. Before running them anywhere — on-premise or in the cloud — you need to understand Oracle's Matching Service Level obligation and where it breaks.
Oracle's Matching Service Level (MSL) rule only applies when you have some licences on support and others not. Please confirm your current Oracle support situation.
Select the primary Oracle product. If you have multiple products, run this assessment for each separately — the MSL analysis differs by product line.
Select all environments that apply. This is where the MSL compliance picture diverges sharply depending on your cloud strategy.
The MSL risk is present whenever even a single supported licence coexists with unsupported licences for the same product. Tell us roughly how your estate is split.
Older Oracle Database versions that have passed their Premier and Extended Support end dates compound the risk — Oracle may argue these are effectively unsupportable, strengthening their claim.
Oracle's audit and sales teams use MSL as a leverage tool — both during formal audits and at renewal time. Your timing affects urgency of action.
Oracle's Matching Service Level policy is contained in Oracle's standard licence agreement terms. It states that if a customer reinstates support on any licence for a given product, they must reinstate support on all licences for that product at the same service level — and pay back-billing for the lapsed period (typically up to 5 years).
The MSL rule is most aggressively used when a customer wants to partially reinstate support, or when Oracle identifies that a customer is running unsupported licences alongside supported ones. The financial exposure can be substantial: Oracle calculates back-support at the current support fee (typically 22% of current list price per year), not the historic rate.
The MSL obligation does not apply where Oracle itself is responsible for the licence and support (e.g. cloud database services, partner-managed solutions with ASFU/ESL licences). Knowing which deployments sit inside and outside this boundary is critical.