Moving on to Amazon Web Services
Since we created our cloud service in 2009, one of the first in oil and gas and still the leader, we have built and managed our infrastructure in multiple data centres in the UK. After a year of work, in the next week we’ll be moving our platform to infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. I want to explain why.
Transforming together
We provide an essential service for many customers. In fact, we now manage a significant percentage of the UK’s oil and gas production data in our cloud. We’re very proud of that fact. We have customers around the globe, and we’re expanding our presence in the US and the Middle East. We believe 100% in the potential of cloud to transform industries, and we want to play our role in transforming ours.
Throughout, we have maintained an unrelenting focus on security, reliability and performance. We have invested heavily in both our software and in the infrastructure to run it.
Development
At the start, we felt that managing our own infrastructure gave us control over costs and performance characteristics that we couldn’t get elsewhere, and allowed us to make changes quickly and easily. However, the pace of development of cloud services has been breathtaking, particularly over the last two years. We’ve reached a point where companies like Amazon and Microsoft are delivering astonishingly powerful environments for the management and delivery of software services. These companies have a global infrastructure, and are investing hugely in standards compliance, security, and auditing. They offer tools that we can integrate with the EnergySys platform to deliver fantastic new capabilities, quickly and easily. We have already modified our roadmap to include three major platform releases next year, and we’re really excited about what we’ll be able to deliver.
An environment to thrive in
One key point to note is that while Amazon are delivering a great environment for us, we’re still responsible for our software and the security of our customer’s data. We’re extending our use of encryption both in flight and at rest, using our own keys, to ensure that data can never fall into the wrong hands. We’re creating even more extensive firewall and access rules that govern the various parts of our network. We’ve always adhered to a “least privilege” model, but with Amazon’s extensive roles and policies mechanisms we can take that even further. We’re adding a huge amount of new monitoring services to ensure we continue to meet and exceed our service SLAs.
Adapting with Amazon Web Services
In the short term, our customers shouldn’t see much change. The service might be a bit faster, but our goal with this first release is to make this mostly invisible. As before, all data will be stored on servers in the European Union. However, we’ll have the option, as our global reach extends. We’ll set up new servers in regions like the US, and to do so in a matter of minutes. It is hard to adequately describe how significant this change will be.
Ultimately, cloud is allowing every company to focus on what it does best. For us, we can focus on software development while Amazon focuses on provisioning and securing data centres and servers. For oil and gas companies, they can focus on finding and producing oil. We give them the production data management service they need to support reporting and allocation.
EnergySys, now powered by Amazon Web Services.