In recent years, the oil and gas industry has had both highs and lows. With prices fluctuating and various market conditions being hit by external forces, there’s no doubt the industry has been a turbulent one.
While most of these conditions are outside the control of those running energy organisations every day, they are responsible for strategic and cost cutting initiatives. It is crucial to the ongoing transformation of the oil and gas industry and, having long transcended the role of backroom support, IT leaders now have wide-ranging responsibilities and are increasingly central to the performance of their organisation. With oil prices reaching record lows and margins becoming squeezed, the need to utilise IT resources as a driver of innovation and improvement has never been clearer.
The consumer market has recently seen the explosion of the ‘sharing economy’ as a result of a deflation in technology. Buyers have been able to realise phenomenal cost savings by taking advantage of shared infrastructure with examples including AirBnB, Uber, LendingClub and many more. Taking AirBnB as an example – in a traditional world, a hotel would be built at large capital expense with significant staff and maintenance costs, but in the AirBnB world, existing homes and infrastructure are used to deliver a similar service in a shared model. This concept is not solely reserved for the consumer market and we’re now seeing it extend into the enterprise world thanks to the cloud. By intelligently leveraging broadly architected infrastructure in a service provider, customers can deliver large savings, while removing most, if not all capex requirements.
Oil and gas organisations operate in a highly complex environment, with whole countries reliant on their continuous operation. This is partly why the industry has rightly been more cautious about embracing the benefits of the cloud, but as barriers are removed, security becomes more proven and cost savings increasingly evident, we’re seeing significantly increased uptake of the technology. The energy industry is one that is incredibly data intensive, and in order to future-proof any investment in infrastructure, scalability is essential. What’s more, high-speed, low latency links between sites is crucial to on-going operational efficiency – both on-shore and off-shore – around the world.
This increasing dependence on technology is now being offset by cost reduction as technologies founded for the consumer market cross over to the enterprise market. This is really good news and will lead to ongoing deflation in IT which we believe will continue for the rest of the decade with significant benefits for oil and gas organisations.
But we are really at the start of this transition of technology options in the enterprise sector where for many organisations first generation Cloud services were inappropriate for surety and privacy reasons. That is why for the last two years we have been looking at a working out how we can bring these new services in a way that can actually be used to solve the disruption of the current economic times as opposed to add to them.
The critical breakthroughs are in the deployment of cloud, that today regional partner’s can support hybrid cloud deployment primarily addressing your surety and security needs AND extend where appropriate to utility clouds. This means that the cost benefits of consumer technology and sharing can be achieved, with the necessary security to guarantee privacy and availability.
We look forward to sharing more detail on how this is achieved in next month’s columns.
Richard is the chief executive of brighsolid. The Warwick Business School graduate has spent 25 years in the IT sector. Richard joined brightsolid full time in 2010. Today brightsolid is a rapidly growing and vibrant cloud provider with new facilities in Aberdeen and Dundee and developments from social media to games.
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