Using the appropriate services, instances and resources for your workload is key to cost savings. A well-architected workload uses the most cost-effective resources, which can have a significant and positive economic impact. You also have the opportunity to use managed services to reduce costs. Oracle offers a variety of flexible and cost-effective pricing options to acquire instances from OCI and other services in a way that best fits your needs.
Costs Awareness
The capability to attribute resource costs to the individual organization or product owners drives efficient usage behavior and helps reduce waste. Accurate cost attribution allows you to know which products are truly profitable, and allows you to make more informed decisions about where to allocate budget. Cost and Usage Analysis will enable you to understand how you consumed the cloud, and what your costs are for that consumption.
Implementing usage controls will ensure excess usage and accompanying costs does not occur.
Three principles to follow for Oracle EBS cost optimization:
- Plan and Estimate costs
- Provision with Optimization
- Use Monitoring and Analytics to gain cost insights.
Techniques to Save Cost of Running Your EBS
- Lower cost with better/automated diagnostics, lower-risk upgrade with SPM/RAT/SPA …
Harness the power of Intelligent Process Automation to build reusable and scalable solutions to automate repetitive tasks, streamline business processes, eliminate seasonality while reducing operating expenses. This will create efficient and effective business processes that increase benefits and maximize value, easily scale, and reduce your Oracle EBS operating expenses. - Optimize your infrastructure resources & understand your options
Maximize efficiency of your onprem or cloud spend, eliminate waste across your environment. This can be done post an analysis of the utilization across the organization. Most cloud providers offer multiple operating models ranging from Pay-as-You-Go to agreement based usage. It is worthwhile to spend time understanding all the operating models to then choose the one that offers you both flexibility and cost optimization eventually ending up with a good ROI. - Get a MSP/MSE to manage operational tasks
An Oracle certified partner, can help you run deep assessment on your current environment either on prem or cloud. This report can help you quickly identify the gaps with which you can save/optimize your cost and improve efficiency. Look out for Oracle certified Platinum partners which are cloud MSP/MSE certified capabilities to help you build road maps for long term success.Over their migration sprints these partners would have built the right tools and proprietary scripts to manage your onprem, data center and Cloud hybrid environments.
- Archive and Purge / Data compression of unused data
Implement a regular purge process including transient data as well as obsolete transactional data, purge old data before performing upgrades. This will eventually reduce time for maintenance activities and save critical time and manpower cost. - Move to the cloud & then continuously optimise
Leverage the agility, flexibility and scalability when opting for OCI. Oracle today offers the best price performance for public cloud workloads for Oracle and Non Oracle workloads alike. It is important to assess the comparison of OCI vs other players like AWS, Google, Azure to help you make an informed decision on your cloud & Managed services options. - Save on Licence cost when moving to cloud
If you intend to BYOL and have not been either audited or had a third party review for your Oracle licensing, it may be to your benefit to have that done before asking for OCI pricing. The results of this work effort will not only ensure you are architecting based upon the licenses you own, it may uncover the need for additional licenses or to architect “License Included” for your databases to impact your TCO. - Advanced analysis – Monitor usage and cost
It is recommended to monitor cost and usage proactively within your organization, not just when there are exceptions or anomalies. Using the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform provides highly visible dashboards throughout your office or work environment to ensure that key people have access to the information they need, and indicate the organization’s focus on cost optimization. Visible dashboards enable you to actively promote successful outcomes and implement them throughout your organization. - Cost aware culture
A cost aware culture allows you to scale cost optimization and cloud financial management through best practices that are performed in an organic and decentralized manner across your organization. This creates high levels of capability across your organization with minimal effort, compared to a strict top-down, centralized approach. - Build an architecture that can recover from failure
Having a DR for your EBS on OCI can save you from unwanted downtime in case of a disaster along with several geographic and cost advantages. Disaster recovery isn’t just about worst-case scenarios, it’s about delivering high-availability to your core applications. Disaster recovery (DR) is a difficult concept in IT. It requires one to not only think about the many implications of a worst-case scenario but also develop a sound response. - Provision only when needed & enable auto-shutdown for dev/test environment
Pay only for what you use. So ensure that all your dev/test environments and in some cases even some production applications are available only during the time when someone is actually using it. Shut down anything and everything that is not being used. The only provision stuff that you really need and ensure it gets auto destroyed once the job is done. - Ensure budgets and billing alerts are in place
Ensure that your alerts are set to permissible limits which can help you avoid a bill shocker at the end of the month. Setting the right process for actions on anomalies will be a true test of a global CIO.
Conclusion
While today cloud undisputedly delivers agility, flexibility and choices, however, assess your options well in advance and document and plan each stage to ensure you maximize your cloud investments returns for long term cloud transformation success. Engage with certified partners who are able to save and optimize costs, & are capable of delivering accelerated cloud migration & long term cloud managed services for your digital transformation initiatives.