The role of cloud in mitigating carbon emissions within the oil and gas industry

While the oil and gas industry is at the centre of climate change debate, with detractors highlighting its impact on overall global emissions, the sector is still crucial to energy security. By centralising data storage in the cloud, reducing their reliance on on-premises data centres and leveraging real-time analytics, cloud solutions can help oil and gas companies optimise their operations, reduce downtime, and make data-driven decisions that improve their overall performance.

The industry is projected to spend up to 12.4 billion dollars per year by 2030 on cloud computing and analytics, as cloud solutions are showing stellar popularity in the sector. Cloud provides a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way to manage and store data. But what many people don't know is that cloud solutions can also have a significant impact on an organisation's carbon footprint.

Choosing a sustainable cloud provider

As oil and gas companies work toward reducing their carbon footprint and become more environmentally friendly, many are turning to the cloud to achieve their goals. According to Gartner, by 2025, carbon emissions from cloud computing providers will be one of the top three criteria that businesses consider when choosing a cloud platform. This increased focus on sustainability is driven by the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting and by the increasing number of organisations that are investing in sustainability initiatives. Prioritising sustainability when selecting a cloud provider means companies can make leaps in their green efforts and demonstrate their commitment to a more sustainable future.

How to embrace the cloud in four steps

I have developed a four-step process to help oil and gas companies move to the cloud as efficiently as possible.

Step 1: Assess

The first step is to assess how all your IT infrastructure resources, both on premises and in the cloud (if you have some in the cloud), are being used today. With this visibility across your hybrid stack, you can both decide what to move and how to optimise that move.

Step 2: Analyse

The second step is to analyse how your data is being used, how you classify it, where it sits and how active it is. I’d advise using technology which helps your company understand what data you have, quickly, and that then enables you to optimise, secure and accelerate your move to cloud. A whopping 68% of data is cold data and being able to optimise that drives both sustainability and cost optimisation objectives.

Step 3: Move

The third step is to move appropriate data to the cloud through migration, backup, and tiering. Public cloud provider data centres are significantly more energy efficient and sustainable than traditional data centres are. By using a service which allows you to migrate your workloads to public cloud, means you can take advantage of sustainability at scale as well as accelerating your cloud journey.

Step 4: Store sustainably

The final step is to use energy-efficient storage for the data that remains in your data centre. Whilst the cloud offers a very sustainable destination for your data, the data that remains on-premises needs to also be delivered as sustainably as possible. Ensure you use not just storage- efficient data platforms, but that these platforms are also able to connect and leverage cloud efficiencies, straight into your data centre.

Move toward a greener future today

Moving to the cloud is an effective way for oil and gas companies to lower their emissions and become more environmentally friendly. Cloud data centres are significantly more energy efficient than traditional data centres are. Taking advantage of that efficiency with a methodical process like the one discussed above: Assess, analyse, move, and store data in a sustainable manner, will not only help you reduce your organisations carbon footprint, but you also reduce costs.

It’s easy. Just four steps, and you can take advantage of the sustainability of the cloud while also reducing costs. It’s a win-win.