Drilling Company Boosts Agility and Competitive Advantage With Enhanced Cloud Platform

Overview

Challenge

• Support innovation and digitalization with flexible infrastructure resources.

Solution

• Hitachi Vantara helped to simplify the migration of new workloads to the cloud and perform a remediation of three existing Azure landing zones.

Outcome

• Improves productivity, agility and data quality.
• Supports ongoing digitalization.
• Boosts competitive advantage and innovation.
• Safeguards security and compliance of cloud environment.

Challenge

Support Digital Innovation in a Competitive Market

From pushing offshore drilling to new depths to deploying IoT solutions to support telemetry on its rigs, the drilling company has a reputation for innovation in the oil and gas exploration industry.

Optimizing the use of new technologies is key to keeping the company’s drilling services competitive in a cost-sensitive market. “With the intelligent use of technology, we can increase efficiency and security on our rigs as well as the quality of the services we provide to our customers around the world,” commented a customer spokesperson.

The company, which employs around 3,000 people, has been quick to embrace the potential of the public cloud and has a well-established Microsoft Azure environment, which underpins a number of innovative digital initiatives.

When an outsourced contract for hosting a number of core applications came to an end, the company decided to leverage its existing investment in Azure. “We want to maximize flexibility by using a mix of private and public cloud resources and provide our DevOps team with self-service options to accelerate innovation,” said the customer spokesperson.

To ensure a seamless transition, the company needed a partner with experience in migrating critical workloads to the cloud in a short time frame.

Solution

Accelerate and Simplify the Migration of Critical Workloads to the Cloud

The drilling company partnered with Hitachi Vantara to not only simplify the migration but also optimize its current Azure environment. The Hitachi Vantara team assessed a range of existing subscriptions covering innovation, pre-production and production workloads, using benchmarks from the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

The assessment revealed a number of improvement opportunities relating to encryption levels, firewall management, and audit processes. Due to tight timelines, Hitachi Vantara had just two weeks to execute an agreed list of recommendations. “The Hitachi Vantara team was quick to understand our operating processes and identify any gaps that needed to be addressed,” said the company spokesperson.

“We assessed the applications that needed to be migrated along with key dependencies and any technical limitations of the underlying infrastructure stack,” said Solution Domain Principals Manager from the Hitachi Vantara professional services team, Steen Munch Schmidt. “We then developed a migration plan based on these findings, which helped to reduce the risk and time involved in moving the new workloads to the cloud.”

By leveraging the Hitachi Cloud Accelerator Platform, the team was able to automate the onboarding of applications, platform components, security policies and management controls to the Azure environment. It also assisted with knowledge transfer to the customer’s internal team to enable them to meet ongoing demand from the business for cloud resources.

Outcome

Greater Agility and Competitive Advantage

By migrating more workloads to its Azure environment, the drilling company can safeguard the continuous delivery of its services and the integration of its operational data. “We helped the customer optimize the operation of their Azure environment, which will increase productivity and agility,” commented Schmidt. “By leveraging cloud resources, the customer can streamline its processes and improve data quality.”

The drilling company needs to be able to share large volumes of test data with its end customers to help them make smarter decisions about future gas and oil explorations and investments. With an optimized cloud environment, the drilling company can manage drilling test data in a more secure, compliant and cost-effective way, which safeguards competitive advantage.

“Thanks to support from Hitachi Vantara, we share large volumes of data, onboard new applications and standup additional Azure services more easily. This will be key to supporting ongoing innovation and digitalization initiatives,” said the company spokesperson.