“For the first time, reducing waste was the highest key priority for FinOps practitioners across all spending tiers. This may be influenced by macroeconomic trends, with businesses looking to reduce spending without reducing value from their cloud investments.” (1)   
 – The State of FinOps 2024  
www.finops.org/insights/key-priorities-shift-in-2024
 

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many times, customer engagements reveal that the “destination” sought for reducing waste involves compute optimization, governance, automation, AI, other tools, more engineers, etc., and a continuous feedback loop between the “optimize” and “operate” phases in FinOps. However, many of our discovery exercises with customers bring us back to the “inform” stage, ensuring our FinOps foundations in OCI are sound. We ask questions such as:

  • Do all personas have the appropriate visibility into our cloud consumptions?
  • Are we monitoring our tags and controlling how they are created and applied to resources?
  • Do we have proper governance rules and quota policies in place to prevent teams from inadvertently spinning up resources that are out of scope?
  • Do we have budgets and alerts in place so that folks can be notified when certain thresholds of spend, forecast, and trends are reached?
  • Do we review and update cloud entitlements, shapes, and subscriptions periodically to ensure they are still aligned with the change of requirements?

In fact, we are often reminded that the “inform” stage is not a one-time set up endeavor. In fact, it may be the most important part of the continuous feedback and monitoring loop among all three phases of FinOps.

Oracle recognizes that each of our customers has unique requirements. We’ve created of a suite of cloud investment services with 77+ certified FinOps Practitioners who offer Oracle GLAS services that support the application of FinOps-focused services for OCI customers.  These complimentary services include:

Visibility / Inform Workshops*

  • Cost and usage reports should be scheduled to be delivered to responsible parties through automation; ensuring all appropriate personas have access and visibility
  • Tagging Analysis
    • To review the tagging structure and the tag values that have been applied to resources; ensuring the latest tag-values are updated to cloud resources
    • To measure the effectiveness of the tagging structure
    • To look for opportunities to automate and standardize the application of tags
  • Administration and subscription rights to review visibility; customer governance protocols
  • Bring Your Own License (BYOL) / Oracle Support Rewards (OSR) entitlements review and management guidance
    • Ensure effective utilization of Oracle cloud programs
    • Leveraging and applying your perpetual licenses
  • Tenancy shape and compute resource review / assessment; customer review / update protocols
  • Entitlements / Shapes / Update protocols / Review process
  • Access and visibility – by FinOps persona; is it engineers only, or are finance, product, ITAM, procurement, and leadership given visibility as well, and if so, to what information, etc.
  • Security review – who has control and governance capability

*Contact Oracle Global Licensing Advisory Services (GLAS) at glas-global_mb@oracle.com to schedule your complimentary workshop

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Continuous cycles of Inform-Optimize-Operate and Crawl-Walk-Run:

As more workloads move to OCI, these workloads are typically operating in complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.  We are mindful that our customers’ IT environments may be operating in various stages of maturity, depending upon the environment. For some organizations, their maturity level in AWS, Azure or GCP environments may be in a mature “run” stage of operation but might be in a “crawl” stage of operation in OCI, therefore requiring heavy focus on the inform phase of the FinOps cycle.

The set up and foundation of our customers’ OCI workloads are critical to efficient resource consumption and successful operation. That is why advisory services at Oracle continue to emphasize the “inform” phase and crawl-maturity foundations within the FinOps cycle.

 

 

 

(1) FinOps Foundation framework terminology, concepts and graphics from www.finops.org

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