Cloud reviews: keeping track of your Oracle SaaS environment

Inoapps Oracle Licensing Series: Part Six

So far in this series, I’ve written blogs on right-sizing before a move to cloud and what happens to cloud deployments when they aren’t properly monitored. A common misconception with cloud applications is that subscriptions can’t be non-compliant and that cloud consumption reviews simply don’t happen and aren’t required.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Cloud usage can be viewed by vendors and needs to match subscriptions. In this blog I’m going to talk about what you can do to increase your awareness of the likely pitfalls and decrease your cloud risks.

In the world of cloud, if you’re consuming more than you’ve bought, these oversights are adjusted by true-ups aligned to your subscription agreement, which may be monthly, quarterly or annually. What that means is that your cloud spend could be increasing exponentially without you being aware of it.

Increasing your awareness

The problem with cloud is that it’s largely invisible. The old on-premises world was tangible and accessible. Questions could be asked of teams responsible for physical servers housed in a geographical data center.

Cloud is more ethereal. Administration consoles are, in theory, accessible by anyone, anywhere, which makes controlling new stuff, including how it’s deployed and for what, very… well… intangible.  

Someone, somewhere in your business will be responsible for keeping your cloud environments under control and in budget. To meet the obligations of that control, visibility is no longer a nice to have. With cloud becoming more powerful, visibility is now a requirement, regardless of your business model.  

But where to start?

The Technical Stuff

• Find your paperwork and know what you’ve purchased and under what terms.
  • The vast majority of companies can’t find the cloud services agreement, associated amendments or the subsequent ordering documents and renewals. If you don’t know this, you’ll struggle to understand the limitations of your cloud deployments.
• Invest time and resource in a consumption review.
  • Once you know what you’ve bought, you then need to understand how it compares to what you’re using and what that means in terms of risk, both contractually and financially.
  • If you’ve taken advantage of the Bring Your Own License model (BYOL) there will be additional considerations as the model brings its own ratios to calculate. This must be done accurately in order to apply what you’ve bought on-premises to what you want to consume in the cloud by migrating the licenses.

The Operational Stuff

• Think about the business process your organization goes through to get new cloud environments up and running.
  • What checks and balances do you have in place? 
  • Who decides if the product is the right one? 
  • Who alerts you to potential new spend or overspend?
  • How many of your subsidiaries use your cloud services? 
  • How do you know if a new acquisition is allowed to use them? 
• If it’s done well, the consumption review will kick up the areas you need to put process focus on, such as:
  • How new users are provisioned.
  • If BYOL has been calculated correctly.
  • What your contracts say about acquisitions (or divestments).
  • When you should be thinking about renewing your agreements.
• How secure is your cloud deployment, particularly if you straddle the worlds of hybrid or multi-cloud? Understanding the security model your business employs helps avoid potential future security threats.

The Financial Stuff

• Evaluate what your cloud spend looks like now.
  • Has it increased or decreased over the last year?
  • Who manages it?
  • Is your business reactively just paying the true-up bills?

How Inoapps can help

From infrastructure to applications, procurement to decommissioning, Inoapps has extensive experience of Oracle software asset management.

If you’d like help understanding and managing your cloud consumption—particularly if you have a heavily customized environment with a lot of custom roles and need insight into your deployments—our Oracle SaaS Subscription Review service, get in touch.

You can also find out more about our services on our Licensing & Subscription Services web page.