Tolga Talks Tech: Innovation in Oil & Gas

The oil and gas industry has increasingly moved towards cloud adoption as they innovate with cloud use cases ranging from big data, artificial intelligence & machine learning (AI/ML) to data center consolidation and IoT innovation. Tolga Tarhan, Onica’s CTO, and Taylor Bird, Onica’s Senior VP of Product and Solutions, talk about technology challenges and the vast number of data solutions utilizing the cloud in oil and gas.

Oil and Gas in the Cloud Today

Oil and gas corporations present countless technology challenges to be addressed through solutions in the cloud, with use cases relevant to IoT, big data, data analytics, and AI/ML. Along with these, there are also data center consolidation, serverless technology, and other more traditional benefits of operating in the cloud. 

Data Solutions in Oil and Gas

Companies analyzing huge amounts of data, such as seismic and geodata across the globe, need the capacity to store data, write analytics, and apply artificial intelligence and machine learning models. This must be done on a huge scale across the planet, securely. Evidently, this raises an important storage and compute problem for oil and gas companies to be able to rely on a platform to store data with scale capacity without it being stolen or leaked.

Compute Solutions in the Cloud

This is where the vast array of cloud compute solutions come in, where there is a virtual machine level component to analyze data constantly on steady state workloads. With serverless technologies and autoscaling, companies can look at data sets that either grow or shrink over time or can analyze them for a particular part of time. Therefore, companies with massive data centers and monolithic systems that originally had to run at full capacity, can now run in the cloud and only pay for that high throughput capacity when needed. 

Storage Solutions in the Cloud

For storage solutions, data warehouses were the industry standard, but now the data lake approach is preferred for enabling innovation. Using the data lake approach can address the problem of storing disorganized, unstructured data by putting it into a single place, apply technology to it, and get the necessary analytics needed. Companies would be storing the data as is, and retrieve data sets and fields when needed without the fear of losing fields they could possibly use in the future, as what would normally happen if data needed to be structured before placing in a data warehouse.

IoT in Oil and Gas

Predictive maintenance has become an obvious IoT case, such as in oil fields, where a field stretches for hundreds of thousands of miles, with well heads a couple feet or miles apart. Companies want to gain data around those systems to understand an array of aspects related to the equipment, like safety violations or asset controls. This is a perfect way to utilize IoT, so there is no need for technicians to check each oil field and well head at a time. 

Amongst the most innovative use cases are machine vision solutions leveraging drones, where companies do visual inspections and surveillance of equipment, ensuring that no one is tampering with the machines or stealing product.

IT Consolidation in the Oil and Gas Industry

IT consolidation has become a traditional migrating to the cloud use case. Previously, oil and gas corporations had to put focus on building data center presence in each part of the world. However, by adopting the cloud, corporations can maintain a global presence and cut costs by not building their own data centers.

Conclusion

Few oil and gas corporations have realized a range of benefits from the cloud. Companies can address scaling for data and compute with data solutions on the cloud. Through the data lake approach, companies can get the relevant analytics from a single place with all the data collected.There have also been innovative IoT use cases around predictive maintenance, as well as drones to monitor safety and asset control. More traditionally, companies also use the cloud to consolidate data centers for more global presence.   

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