Cloud’s next leap in energy and resources

The last decade has been a crescendo of challenges for companies in the energy and resources sector. Although the appetite for their products and services continues to increase—global electricity consumption grew 36.4% between 2009 and 2019, during which time world oil demand grew 14.2% —delivering them consistently, efficiently, affordably, and safely has become exponentially more difficult thanks to a litany of internal and external threats.

Internal to the industry, energy and resources companies face workforce shortages, the need to add digital and data skills, and rising material/component costs. Externally, pressure is mounting from regulators who seek compliance with new laws and standards in areas such as sustainability and data privacy. Meanwhile, the menace of cyberattacks looms large as threat actors seek new opportunities to make money, pilfer trade secrets, and cause political and economic damage by way of disrupting critical infrastructure.

Supporting sustainable business models for the future

Clearly, risks in the energy and resources industry are great. But so is resilience—particularly among businesses that boast mature processes in sales, supply chain, data, and IT. Confronted with volatile oil prices and equally volatile demand during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent war in Ukraine, enterprises have shifted their attention toward activities that can further bolster that resilience. For example, US and Canadian utilities are rapidly converting to renewable generation sources, including distributed energy resources.

Over the course of the pandemic, the percentage of energy and resources execs using a mix of multiple public clouds with one or more private cloud rose from 47% to 64%.

The trend toward new sustainable business models supported by mature IT is escalating across sectors. It represents a significant opportunity for energy and resources enterprises, which have emerged from the pandemic newly emboldened to accelerate digital transformation as a means of modernizing stale product portfolios and outdated operating procedures.

Hybrid cloud is a key enabler. By helping them respond rapidly and effectively to changing business environments, it can give energy and resources companies the ability to:

• Quickly and easily connect ecosystem partners and suppliers that have different cloud and hosting standards
• Drive faster agile development cycles
• Scale workloads, such as remote access
• Stay in control of, redirect, and adapt supply chains
• Manage the control and security of the enterprise architecture.

To determine the current state of cloud-powered digital transformation in the energy and resources industry, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) partnered with Oxford Economics to gain insights from C-suite executives from the chemicals, energy and utilities, industrial products, mining, and petroleum sectors. What we found was a compelling case for the use of hybrid cloud by energy and resources enterprises.

Download the report to learn how hybrid cloud is helping these companies increase innovation, improve performance, and maintain competitive advantage in the midst of increased chaos and complexity.