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October 09, 2019

BP implements solid cloud governance and effective cost management with Azure

BP has moved a significant portion of its IT resources to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform over the past five years as part of a company-wide digital transformation. To manage and deliver all its Azure resources in the most efficient possible way, BP uses Azure Policy for governance to control access to Azure services. At the same time, the company uses Azure Cost Management to track usage of Azure services. BP has been able to reduce its cloud spend by 40 percent with the insights it has gained.

BP

“By using Azure Policy, we bring consistency, agility, and automation to our governance approach—it’s no longer something manual, subjective, and open to interpretation.”

Denis Ontiveros, Security Platforms Director, BP

BP has taken a cloud-first approach to technology with Microsoft Azure for the past five years as part of a full-scale digital transformation encompassing all parts of the global energy company. From cloud infrastructure to cloud-based AI, BP works hard to ensure that employees gain the many benefits that come with a shift from on-premises IT to the Azure platform.

“We want our project and application teams to be able to easily access Azure services when they need them,” says John Foster, Head of Microsoft Platforms at BP. “This means having a solid governance model in place to improve the user experience while at the same time keeping control over BP’s data and having insight into our whole cloud estate, including spending. With Azure, we have the tools we need to do all that.”

Governing cloud services for easy access and control

BP currently has 25 percent of its applications in the cloud, and that number is growing rapidly. When its cloud transformation began, BP had a highly manual governance process that was time-intensive and resulted in inconsistencies in the way the company delivered cloud services. BP knew it needed to make a change.

“We moved to a hub-and-spoke service model, which Microsoft recommends, and we created what we call the Azure Product Council, containing architecture team members from all parts of the company and our Microsoft contact,” explains Foster. “The council determines the most efficient way to deliver and govern the services people want.”

To maintain cloud governance and set the right guardrails across its entire Azure environment of 250 subscriptions, BP makes extensive use of Azure Policy, which offers audit, enforcement, and remediation controls over all Azure services. Having Azure Policy built into the cloud platform helps BP easily define, review, and enforce best practices to ensure that the company has guardrails in place at every layer and access policies that remain resilient to change. “By using Azure Policy, we bring consistency, agility, and automation to our governance approach—it’s no longer something manual, subjective, and open to interpretation,” says Denis Ontiveros, Security Platforms Director at BP. “We can implement controls in a much more sustainable way.” 

BP stores policies in its source repository and deploys them as part of the company’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) process. “The migration to policies as code contributes to our ability to adopt a flexible and responsive approach and to automate governance,” says Tom Inglis, Director of Developer Platforms at BP. “Without Azure Policy, we would have a hard time keeping up with the pace of change that the company is striving for in our cloud infrastructure migration.” 

To help organize and manage its subscriptions and resources, BP created a three-part hierarchy of Azure management groups. Each new subscription gets associated with a particular management group and assigned the corresponding Azure role-based access controls (RBAC). Using management groups also gives BP a way to oversee and set budget thresholds for its various business units. 

Realizing greater business value with cost management and time savings

To better manage its cloud infrastructure usage and spending, BP uses Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor, finding it very helpful to have fine-grained insight into its cloud resource utilization. “I encourage our employees to use Azure Cost Management to find ways to reduce spending—by turning off virtual machines over the weekend when they’re not needed or deleting orphan storage, for example,” says John Maio, Microsoft Platform Chief Architect at BP. “This helps us be better stewards of the company’s money and get more value out of our Azure experience.”

The ability to easily optimize spending has brought significant benefits. “Over the past few years, we’ve really gotten serious about cost monitoring,” says Maio. “In that time, we’ve used Azure Cost Management to help cut our cloud costs by 40 percent. Even though our total usage has close to doubled, our total spending is still well below what it used to be.”

In addition to saving money, the move to Azure has saved BP a lot of time. “We can now deploy entire sets of application infrastructure in a 24-hour period—a process that used to take as long as six to eight weeks,” says Foster.

Adds Maio, “All of a sudden, you’ll see sprints where we push 100 applications live over a six-week period, which is pretty amazing compared to what we were able to do on-premises. It’s changed how we think about the work we do.”

Find out more about BP on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

“We’ve used Azure Cost Management to help cut our cloud costs by 40 percent. Even though our total usage has close to doubled, our total spending is still well below what it used to be.”

John Maio, Microsoft Platform Chief Architect, BP

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