OCI Cloud Operations & FinOps at Banque Misr

Banque Misr is one of Egypt's oldest and largest state-owned financial institutions, expanding into Saudi Arabia with a full branch in Riyadh. I was based on-site at the Riyadh office, embedded in the team responsible for standing up the bank's cloud infrastructure from the ground up — not a remote engagement, not a handoff, but day-to-day presence building something new in a regulated environment.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy needed to be implemented properly from the start: compartment structures, VCN design, IAM, monitoring, and cost governance — all built to meet the standards a bank operating under Saudi financial regulations requires. My role covered full OCI ownership across every layer of that platform.

• Platform Implementation & Configuration: Hands-on implementation of OCI services — compute instances, block and object storage, load balancers, and database services. Configured compartment structures and policies aligned to the bank's internal org model and Egyptian Central Bank data classification requirements.
• Network Architecture (VCN): Redesigned the Virtual Cloud Network topology to properly segment workloads by classification, enforce routing controls between subnets, and establish clean hybrid connectivity patterns. The goal was a network design the internal team could extend without inadvertently breaking security boundaries.
• IAM & Security Posture: Audited all IAM policies and tightened least-privilege access across compartments. Established clear role boundaries between operations, development, and admin personas — reducing blast radius on any single compromised account.
• Day-to-Day Operations: Owned incident response, capacity management, backup verification, and platform health monitoring across the OCI environment. Implemented alerting for compute, storage, and network anomalies using OCI native tooling, giving the team visibility they didn't have before.
• Cloud FinOps: Introduced structured cost governance — budget tagging by workload and cost centre, rightsizing recommendations based on actual utilisation data, reserved capacity planning, and monthly cost reporting. Delivered consistent visibility into cloud spend in an environment that previously had none.
• Team Enablement: Built operational runbooks for every recurring task — incident triage, backup checks, access reviews, cost reviews. Delivered hands-on training sessions to bridge the gap between the team's strong on-premises background and OCI-native ways of working.