The energy and utilities sector will continue to evolve at a rapid pace — and so will the underlying technology used to support energy production. To avoid accumulating more technical debt, many organizations are considering modernization projects such as migrating to the cloud to help prioritize workloads and reduce reliability and support issues. However, it can be difficult to understand where to begin the process or how to achieve this safely while minimizing disruptions.

MNP Digital has helped many organizations transition from on-premises software to hybrid and cloud-based platforms. In our experience, moving to the cloud has many factors you need to consider to achieve a successful migration. Let’s discuss the benefits of moving to the cloud, the risks you may face during a cloud migration, and how to overcome these obstacles.

Many Canadian energy and utilities organizations are still running on-premises and legacy infrastructure. However, this infrastructure requires frequent maintenance and upgrades, as well as significant ongoing investments in hardware, physical space, and team resourcing. This may not provide the agility or stability your organization needs to reliably produce energy and adapt to a changing sector.

Migrating to the cloud can help your company respond rapidly to change, improve the resilience and security posture of your organization, and increase opportunities for innovation. Forty-four percent of the North American Energy members have some cloud resources, and your company risks falling behind if it does not invest in this new technology.

These are some of the benefits that a cloud migration can provide to your energy and utilities company:

• Predictive cost model — Cloud platforms offer a subscription-based model, which reduces unpredictable IT infrastructure investments and operational expenses.
• Usage-based pricing — Similar to time-of-use pricing, your company will only pay for the cloud resources it uses and is able to control when those workloads are used. This allows you to scale up or down based on demand and ensures cost efficiency.
• Improved resilience — Cloud environments provide more system redundancy and automatic failover without the need for extra hardware or datacenters. This helps ensure uptime and minimizes the risk of outages.
• Auto-scaling and provisioning — The cloud automatically adjusts resources based on demand, which enables it to handle peak loads without over-provisioning infrastructure. This enables your company to simply scale up when needed, instead of guessing how much demand you will face in the future.
• Improved data management and analytics — Cloud solutions have robust tools to support data collection, storage, and analytics. This enables your company to consolidate its many data-generating workloads into a single source of truth that supports informed decision-making.
• Increased opportunity for innovation — The cloud provides access to new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which allows companies to foster innovation, enhance operational efficiency, and improve the customer experience. Proof-of-value, proof-of-concept, or simple test cases can all be provisioned quickly and de-provisioned just as quickly with no lingering costs.
• Regulatory incentives — Governments and regulatory bodies may provide incentives for energy and utilities companies to adopt cloud technology that supports environmental goals such as reducing carbon footprints.
• Advanced threat protection — Cloud providers invest heavily in the security of these platforms and offer effective threat detection and mitigation tools. The cloud tools used to defend against cyber threats also continue to evolve as the threat landscape continues to change.

Moving to the cloud can help your company increase productivity and enhance innovation. However, transitioning to the cloud also includes several mitigatable risks. It is crucial to understand each of these risks and how to address them to achieve a successful migration.

It is vital to ensure your cloud landing zone is properly designed and provisioned. This helps ensure that your company’s infrastructure is scalable, secure, and aligns with cloud best practices. A poorly provisioned foundation can cause performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and inefficiencies.

Ensure that your cloud services meet industry standards and regulatory requirements. Improperly configured cloud services can result in operational failures, data breaches, or security risks.

Your cloud architecture and tools must support your company’s long-term goals and business objectives — such as cost efficiency or innovation. Migrating to the cloud without ensuring this alignment can cause your company to waste its resources and miss opportunities.

An effective governance structure helps ensure that the migration process follows compliance, security, and operational policies. Inconsistent practices, security gaps, and noncompliance with regulatory requirements all occur without a strong governance framework in place.

It is necessary to ensure operational policies such as monitoring, logging, and incident response are adapted for the new cloud environment. Transitioning to the cloud without these processes in place can cause operational blind spots, which makes it more difficult to detect and respond to incidents quickly.

Siloed governance requirements can create inconsistent security, compliance, and operational practices across your organization. It is important to establish a unified governance model spanning all departments to ensure your cloud infrastructure is cohesive and secure.

It can be unclear who is responsible for managing, securing, and optimizing different parts of your cloud infrastructure without clearly defined accountability for workloads and services. This may create inefficiencies, gaps, or operational risks.