BP embraces digital transformation and the cloud to disrupt the energy industry

Meeting the energy and business challenges of the twenty-first century

Although BP is well known as a global oil and gas pioneer, it has repositioned itself as an integrated energy company that focuses on finding innovative ways to address what it calls “the dual challenge”—reducing carbon emissions while simultaneously meeting the world’s ever-growing demand for energy. To do this, BP has increased its investments in renewable energy, shifted its exploration focus from oil to more natural gas, and sought new ways to operate more efficiently and responsibly.

“Safety is our number one priority, always,” says Kennedy. “Developing skills and capabilities with new technologies to keep our employees safe and to remove our employees from harsh environments is something that is really important to us.”

Meanwhile, BP continues to grow as a business and enter new markets worldwide—it recently opened its first retail location in China and sees the country as a major growth area. To facilitate this expansion while meeting its carbon-reduction goals, BP has made technology modernization and transformation one of the key pillars of its core corporate strategy.

“Historically, our IT organization has taken a conservative approach and followed a traditional waterfall model, but its structure doesn’t map to the way that we understand business demand,” explains Kennedy. “We’re now moving to a service-layered DevOps model based on an agile delivery methodology and enabled by core enterprise platforms. This change includes a full-scale reskilling of our organization at every level so we can take advantage of the possibilities that new technologies offer.”

Taking a cloud-first approach to digital transformation

Early in its digital transformation journey, BP realized that its standard model of managed outcome outsourcing of IT delivery and on-premises datacenters made it impossible to achieve the agility and pace the company sought. BP wanted to be able to get workloads up to speed faster and reduce time to market for applications in order to bring new capabilities to its employees so they have the tools at hand to achieve the company’s key business goals of innovation and safety.

“To be fast and responsive, we needed to make a 180-degree shift from the familiar technologies and structures we’d been working with for years,” says Kennedy. “It became very clear that we could only achieve our goals with a world-class cloud infrastructure, so we declared a cloud-first strategy and went all in to exit our physical datacenters.”

When it came time to choose a cloud platform to support these goals, BP turned to Microsoft Azure. BP has had a long and successful history with Microsoft solutions, and it felt that there was strong alignment between the two companies’ roadmaps. 

“We see Microsoft as a real thought leader around digital transformation—with the skill, the scale, and the vision to help us get where we want to go,” says Kennedy. “And we love the fact that Azure works with the wider Microsoft solution set, so we can choose from a full, end-to-end technology stack comprised of products that are easy to use together. That’s very different from some other cloud providers.” 

BP also appreciated the high level of security available in Azure and the tools it provides to protect the company’s infrastructure, like Microsoft Azure Security Center. “As with any organization, data security is of primary importance to us,” says Kennedy. “We trust the level of security Microsoft builds into Azure, so we can spend less time focusing on those issues and more time focusing on our business goals. We use Azure Security Center to set policies and procedures that make life easier for our employees. We can give them access to the resources they need while also ensuring that sensitive data and applications are properly protected.”

Moving to the cloud means that developers and other employees now have access to resources on their own, making it difficult for the organization to keep control of internal and external compliance. As a result, it is important for BP to establish a strong governance framework. “We used to rely on processes like documentation or approval loops to keep everything under control, but that reduced our agility,” explains Kennedy. “With Azure, we have services like Azure Policy—we can set guardrails throughout the organization and enable people to move quickly, trusting that they are following compliance requirements. We can also optimize our spend through Azure Cost Management, which helps us get an understanding of what we are spending today and recommends ways to get more value out of Azure.”

To learn more about how BP is adapting its governance policies to the cloud, read this story. For more information about the company’s use of cloud-based security services in Azure, read this story.

Developing a cloud strategy and exploring new technologies

As part of its cloud-first transition, BP needed to develop a strategy for moving its IT resources into the cloud. The company chose a datacenter-by-datacenter approach driven by the lease expiration dates on its worldwide facilities. BP also made the unusual decision to migrate its most complex workloads first, because that process would help develop the necessary engineering capabilities and models to make the rest of the migrations easy.

Throughout the process, BP worked closely with Microsoft, and that proved to be a great pairing. “We’ve had fantastic support from Microsoft, beyond anything that we could have ever imagined,” says Kennedy. “It’s been an awesome relationship that has produced a first-class design for our Azure platform.”

The datacenter migration is an important part of BP’s emission reduction plans. The company estimates that 60 percent of its IT carbon production comes from its datacenters, so the move to the cloud is key to reducing the overall number. Another 20 percent comes from workplace computing devices. BP is helping cut that contribution with the energy-saving capabilities and cloud-based productivity applications in its deployment of Microsoft 365—which includes Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10. BP has announced a goal to make its IT operations carbon-neutral by the end of 2019, and it’s on track to meet that target.

While BP is committed to going cloud-first, there are some parts of its ecosystem that need to remain on-premises for the time being. So BP has taken a hybrid approach where necessary using solutions like Microsoft Azure Stack. “We operate in 73 countries, including some of the remotest parts of the world where the infrastructure isn’t ready to support full cloud and in some countries where strict data sovereignty laws make the cloud transition a slower process,” says Kennedy. “With Azure Stack, we can easily manage an integrated architecture and achieve the benefits of the cloud in a disconnected scenario, within our own datacenters when needed.”

BP is also looking to new and emerging technologies to help the company stand out as an industry innovator. It has made a big investment in AI and machine learning to bring greater sophistication to its operations and increase the safety of its workers. BP engineers are using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to optimize the extraction of hydrocarbon reserves. And the company envisions a future in which some of the most hazardous tasks—such as those on offshore drill rigs—will be automated by AI, and workers will monitor operations remotely instead of working onsite.

For a more detailed look at BP’s move to a hybrid cloud-based infrastructure, read this story. For a deeper dive into BP’s use of AI and machine learning, read this story. And to read more on the company’s use of Microsoft 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, read this story.

Making the most of a valuable partnership

BP understands that technology upgrades alone aren’t enough to make change happen—a full digital makeover involves upgrades to its human resources as well. “We want to help our employees achieve their full potential in our new digital world,” says Kennedy. “To do this, we’re helping them gain the skills and capabilities they need to drive innovation and help us be that industry disruptor we aim to be. Digital achievement requires a different mindset, from our leadership down to developers and designers at all levels. We want everyone in the company to excel.”

Here again, the relationship with Microsoft has facilitated the change that BP is looking for. “We’re fundamentally altering our business processes, and that requires a leap of faith,” says Kennedy. “Having a visionary company like Microsoft at our side made that leap easier. With Microsoft, we don’t just get a technology supplier, we get a trusted adviser that understands all the factors that go into a corporate-wide digital transformation. We see Microsoft as deeply invested in our success and willing to go the extra mile to make sure we achieve it.”

Find out more about BP on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.