Stop overspending and underutilizing in the cloud

I think we can all agree, the cloud is pretty great. It's elastic, it's flexible and the most important thing about the cloud is that it's someone else's responsibility. But the benefits of being able to access virtually infinite resources at your fingertips also comes with new risks. Without efficient cloud cost governance your cost may spiral out of control and you may exceed your budget.

Today, I'm excited to talk to you about our renewed OCI Cost Management and Governance space and introduce some of the new services that we've launched recently.

According to IDC: “By 2023 80% of organizations using cloud services will establish a dedicated FinOps function to automate policy-driven observability and optimization of cloud resources to maximize value”.

FinOps is not a buzzword, it's an organization of cloud practitioners that assembled to offer and share best practices for cost management and optimization in the cloud.

The fundamental challenges with Cloud governance today are:

1. An all-you-can-eat culture where developers and teams consume expensive resources without any visibility into cost or accountability.
2. Tension between productivity and control where IT departments need to enable teams within their organizations, while ensuring secure and compliant practices.
3. Lack of visibility without effort where organizations need to establish metrics and build programs to track them.
4. And lastly, it's just hard to use due to the complexity of the cloud. It teams need to establish an entirely new discipline like spin offs and have long wrap up times to familiarize themselves with Cloud concepts.

Figure 1: Main hurdles to good Cloud Cost Management and Governance

These hurdles lead to challenges migrating mission critical applications to the cloud. Oracle believes there's another way to control and govern your cost: An easy and prescriptive way illustrated with the portfolio of services below:

Figure 2: OCI comprehensive portfolio of Cost Management and Governance services

OCI portfolio of services in this space offers comprehensive solutions to the challenges we just discussed.

Organize:?To structure your cloud resources and set yourself up for success. Organizations provides an umbrella over all your tenancies providing centralized controls. You benefit as well from a folder-like structure with tenancies and the possibility to automate resource tagging within and across tenancies.

Figure 3: Quick demo of Organization service

Report and Analyze: To answer any question you have about where you're spending money in OCI and generate cross charging reports. Cost Analysis, Cost and Usage Reports services will provide you depth and breadth on your activity in OCI.

Figure 4: Quick Demo of cost management tools

Govern: Create guidelines and policies to help your organization stay compliant. With this set of services you are able to enforce limits on usage, impose certain usage policies across all your tenancies and track your licenses usage that you’ve brought to the cloud.

Figure 5: Quick demo of License Manager service

Budget and Forecast: Set and monitor your budget and be notified when our forecast indicate that you’re reaching your set limit.

Optimize and Reduce Costs: Right-size your cloud resources and offset support costs with services like Advisor. OCI Cloud Advisor reveals under-utilized resources, helps you quickly right-sizes your resources and forecasts savings based on your actual consumption. And in addition our Support Rewards allows you to offset your Oracle support costs in exchange of OCI consumption.

Figure 6: Quick demo of Cloud Advisor service

Figure 7: Quick overview of Support Rewards

So get the full benefit of moving to the cloud and make sure OCI Cost Management and Governance services are part of your cloud practice. Check out the OCI Cost Management and Governance service page to learn more and read up about new features.

Originally appeared on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Blog .

Author: Julien Lehmann, Director of Cloud GTM JAPAC