Business Applications

Industry analysts estimate only 1-2% of total industry spending goes to IT and digital enhancements. Energy companies also allocate 20% less of their IT budgets to digital transformations than companies in other industries. Compared to digital leaders, they spend 55% less.

Oil & Gas companies must transition from their legacy core applications (both enterprise and core business) to cloud-native architecture to take maximum advantage of integrated processes and data.

Compute & Cloud

Cloud can transform Oil & Gas in two ways; breaking the data and technological silos that have hindered the industry’s transformation, and enabling key capabilities such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The slow adoption of cloud at scale is not entirely due to the energy industry not realizing the value potential. Legitimate concerns around the high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities of cloud solutions to satisfy energy- specific demand, regulatory concerns, the specialized nature of operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, and other issues have traditionally left cloud as a secondary priority.

However, this is changing and cloud can transform every part of the value chain:

- Upstream - cloud computing can connect financial and operational data along with real-time sensing technology to optimize decision-making on spending, well productivity, and cycle time across the upstream “system.”

- Midstream - cloud can deliver impact in two key areas: pipeline network management and commercial optimization. Cloud makes it possible to carry out coordinated remote pipeline monitoring at scale, which enables more effective predictive operations, including emissions detection.

- Downstream - cloud can help expand visibility and integration within and across plants and time periods, thereby enabling self optimising planning, predictive operations, risk calibration, and better cost management.

ABI Research has found that cloud spending in the industry is expected to rise by 4-5 times over the next five to six years.

Digital Workplace

With availability of suitable talent a major issue for the Oil & Gas industry as reliable digital workplace that operates in the hostile environments of the industry is critical to productivity. Research shows that 50% of a worker’s time can be augmented using current intelligent technologies.

A modern collaborative digital workplace is critical to a remotely located workforce. It ranges from access to HR applications and core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools. 

Security, Compliance & Data Privacy

Security and data breaches are a high priority issue. Oil & Gas is a high profile industry with attack potential from criminal, political and governmental sources. Stakeholders would expect them to operate at a very high level of security and privacy, this includes identity management, data security, privacy management and cybersecurity. 

However research has found that more than a third (35%) of oil & gas companies had more than 500,000 customer data records exposed in 2020. Accenture research has found that oil and gas players, when compared to companies in other industries, are nearly four times worse at stopping targeted cyberattacks. They are four times slower at finding breaches. Three times slower when it comes to fixing them. And only half as effective at reducing their impact. Attack vectors are becoming increasingly complex and large, with 40% of
breaches being the result of indirect attacks through an ecosystem partner.

 The ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline in the US is a good example of the threat.