The cloud imperative for the energy industry

With the energy industry priorities shifting and the volume of data steadily rising, the need for cloud has never been greater. At the same time, the cloud value proposition for energy companies has never been stronger, therefore truly embracing the potential now has become a business imperative.

The energy industry has never been more ready to embrace the cloud potential. The energy cloud market is growing significantly each year, and many operators have started experimenting with cloud technologies. Oilfield services companies are leading the charge, with many planning to completely retire their on-premise IT in the next five years. But even the supermajors are embarking on their journeys to cloud.

The energy industry needs to pursue three reinvention imperatives:

• Enhancing agility and resilience
• Boosting competitiveness
• Enabling sustainability

Why cloud?

Energy companies’ structural and technological limitations have created barriers to connectivity, scalability and effective data management—three things that are essential to achieving the industry’s imperatives and its reinvention. Cloud helps to dismantle these barriers by providing seamless and instant connectivity and computing power that is scalable and comes at a lower cost. It also transforms an organization’s ability to use data in fundamentally new ways.

Data in the energy industry is typically housed in many disconnected on-premise systems and databases. Reinvention calls for bringing all that data together to enable an enterprise-wide view, generate insights through the application of analytics and applied intelligence tools such as machine learning, and facilitate better and faster decision-making. Current IT environments are simply not up to the task. The issue will become even more daunting as the amount of data at energy companies’ disposal continues to proliferate.

Why now?

Cloud is a powerful foundation on which to build the data capabilities that are needed now. Companies that employ cloud (and cloud-only analytics tools with computing requirements that can only be addressed with cloud) to harness the power of data will enjoy a clear competitive advantage.

Cloud platforms enable near real-time connectivity between what have traditionally been siloed functional areas. This connectivity makes it possible for companies to build and leverage advanced analytics to analyze, explore and establish causal relationships between various functions. An understanding of these functional relationships, in turn, enables companies to take an integrated business view to decision-making.

In an industry that is inherently volatile and cyclical, this integrated view is critical for developing resilience, as well as the flexibility that is needed to scale up or down with fluctuating cycles. Energy companies that fail to take advantage of cloud’s connectivity, flexibility and security will find it exceedingly difficult to achieve the business resilience, variable cost models and value-optimization capabilities that enable competitiveness. Ultimately, it is a collaborative environment that enables the energy to become sustainable.

Across the energy value chain and current industry applications

Cloud can transform every element of the energy value chain. Connectivity, scalability, analytics and automation can drive cost savings and profitability in virtually countless ways.