Industry cloud prioritises vertical solutions and integrations, offering highly customised solutions to accelerate business growth and business operations. Within the energy sector, the industry cloud is mainly used for customer relationship management (CRM), providing real-time data and hosting software. Undoubtedly, there is a significant opportunity to redefine and transform the relationship between organisations and their customers.
In the face of rapidly rising customer demand and technological advancement, energy companies are searching for new IT solutions that offer agility, scalability, and sovereign data protection to accelerate organisational growth.
There is a phenomenal digital transformation in the energy industry as energy trends shift to renewables, advanced digitalisation, and customer engagement. The cloud is the foundation of this digital differentiation, allowing organisations to distinguish themselves from the emerging competition and cement themselves as industry leaders.
Critical Challenges in the Energy Sector
With the fluctuating demand, organisations need to be flexible in vulnerable situations.
Services must be entirely digitalised and friction-free to gain a competitive edge over other companies that haven’t adopted digital tools. In addition, there is an increasing suspicion over companies consuming and analysing customer data. The new data legislation – Consumer Data Rights (CDR) in Australia, focuses on such concerns in the industry.
With stagnant digital growth, even established energy providers face the threat of digital startups more than ever. Reduced energy costs and transformed customer loyalty barriers allow digital startups to take greater risks than established energy providers. They target small customer segments, offer much-refined customer experiences, and gain a competitive edge. The rise of digital startups creates the urgency to innovate, remain competitive, and prioritise the customer experience.
Cloud technology is Enabling Innovation, Resilience, and Digital Transformation in the Energy Sector
In a recent report – The State of the Public Cloud in the Enterprise – 81% of organisations believed that the cloud accelerated their innovation, with 64% finding the cloud more secure than on-premises infrastructure.
Digital transformation within any industry heavily relies on massive data gathering and mining activities. Energy companies must implement these activities across all business operations, including but not limited to, customer interactions, digital usage, competition analysis, energy usage trends, and technology trends.
A majority of the organisations in the energy industry unlock the value of cloud through monitored infrastructure, optimised operations of complex energy systems, adaptability in response to fluctuating demand, and more. Organisations are implementing cloud solutions to overcome investment and maintenance challenges with massive hardware infrastructure and on-premises IT solutions, leverage cutting-edge technologies, and ensure resilience.
For start-ups and established organisations, the transition to the cloud enables them to better manage industry disruptions, reinvent business models, and fuel innovation in delivering their services. With the advancement in devices, browsers, accessibility, applications, and screen sizes, content creation requirements are also rapidly changing. Moving to the cloud allows organisations to leverage greater flexibility, transparency, limitless scalability, and optimal data protection.
In the face of a rapidly growing market and rising customer expectations, many energy companies are turning to the industry cloud to develop a personalised cloud approach for growth, agility, and a competitive edge. Cloud technology allows organisations in the energy sector to view and analyse real-time data. It also allows optimal maintenance and productivity, even for companies with multiple locations or geographically dispersed plants.
The adoption of any industry-based technology can introduce various advantages and opportunities. Enterprise cloud computing service providers employ a dedicated IT team to manage the security and protection of the platform, investing significantly in their infrastructure.
Cybersecurity and Initiatives in the Energy Sector
With the rise in the sophistication and frequency of cyber threats, the Australian Government, developed the Cyber Security Strategy 2020. The foundational aim of this strategy is to build a more secure digital world for Australian citizens, organisations, and essential services while protecting the critical infrastructure that all Australians rely on. The strategy is expected to invest over $1.67 billion by 2030 and has introduced new legislation and regulatory controls to support the vision.
The Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (SOCI Act) with the amendments introduced by the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure Protection) Act (SLACIP) 2021 provide a requirement for increased transparency of the ownership and accessibility of critical infrastructure and improved collaboration between all levels of Government. Under the SLACIP Act, critical infrastructure organisations may be required to strengthen their cyber security capabilities through implementing effective risk management programs and reporting critical and other cyber security incidents to the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
The Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework (AESCSF) program provides tools to assess cyber security capabilities across Australia’s energy sector. Its assessment is based on well-established and globally adopted frameworks such as the NIST CSF and ES-C2M2. The Australian Government has now extended the AESCSF program to gas markets and non-Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) electricity grids and to the liquid fuels sector. Currently, over 270 energy market participants in the country use the AESCSF.
Organisations Implemented Cloud Technology to Overcome Existing Challenges in Cybersecurity and Technology Strategy
The primary energy consumption in Australia covers petroleum, coal, natural gas, hydropower, and non-hydro renewables.
Currently, petroleum provides almost 33% of Australia’s primary energy consumption. Over the last decade, the transportation sector has been the largest energy user. In the financial year 2019-20, before the pandemic, the energy sector drove revenue of $71.9 billion, with 1047 organisations and over 80,000 employees.
With over 2500 employees in the top organisations of the energy sector driving over $7 billion in revenue yearly, organisations have developed their set of cybersecurity and technology strategies to ensure data protection and resilience. Increasingly, organisations are moving to cloud-native solutions to specifically address secure data management challenges.
Data management strategies focus on authorised access to critical information, a controlled framework to identify cyber events and ensure business continuity and automated security controls. Many companies have created a multi-year strategy to initiate cloud migration and replace legacy on-premises systems with SaaS applications – cloud based services they can use on demand.
Key Initiatives to Enhance Cybersecurity in the Energy Sector
With cloud technology applications, organisations have leveraged cutting-edge technology to accelerate digital transformation. For example, using IoT sensors and robots, organisations have reduced the 10-day supercomputer processing time to merely 90 minutes or implemented secure and seamless disaster recovery plans to ensure resilience and minimise downtime. Other organisations have focused on managing existing and new franchises with open source technology to build cloud-specific platforms.
Organisations have deployed cloud-based supply chain planning systems to improve business operations, enable remote fuel management and the ability to extract real-time fuel data. In other areas, cloud platforms are used to create centralised data repositories, which streamline the collection and storage of business information that can be shared with employees globally and enable collaboration in workplaces.
Cloud technology is the foundational technology for Artificial Intelligence, which can deliver aerial drone cameras for media footage and other robotics cameras and sensors for video and image processing. Infrared cameras to reduce the risk of fatigue-related haul truck incidents in coal mining sites leverage cloud technology with data from cameras monitoring eyelid closure, facial and head movements, and other unsafe behaviour to identify potential risks.
