Agility may not be the first word that comes to mind when thinking of multinational gas lines or massive offshore drilling stations, but when it comes to operations, players in the oil and gas industry need to be fast and flexible to keep up with their competitors, satisfy their customers and manage regulations.
The industry’s early adoption of digital tools continues to push companies to innovate with solutions like predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and real-time forecasting. This is especially the case as the digitization of oil and gas has shown major benefits in operational efficiency – according to McKinsey, with the right data and analytics, leaders in energy could recoup an estimated 23% shortfall in maximum production potential.
Industry professionals are now turning to IT leaders to develop infrastructure equipped to support the emerging technologies that enable critical data analytics. Today, the industry relies on this data to prevent disaster, serve a global community and operate distributed supply chains. This means a resilient, always-on IT delivery method that is close to the data delivery point is crucial.
PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
Predictive maintenance doesn’t just save time and money; it can also prevent accidents and downtime. In an industry with volatile materials and heavy machinery, knowing about a problem before it happens is crucial at every level. The sooner potential issues are spotted, the faster they can be solved.
Ensuring that processing occurs close to the point of delivery maximizes predictive maintenance technologies by reducing latency issues and enhancing data delivery speeds. As noted in the Wall Street Journal, processing information close to the source can speed results by 100-fold. And while a few hundred milliseconds may seem small, latency can add up quickly. Processing sensor data locally, at the edge means companies can identify risk and manage issues faster.
REMOTE MONITORING
Some predictive maintenance is made possible by remote monitoring. Oil and gas industry sites can be hard to reach, dangerous and often unmanned, so utilizing remote monitoring improves worker safety and employee retention, in addition to saving time and money.
Of course, these benefits are only available if the information is accessible. In this case, rooting an IT infrastructure strategy in interconnected colocation improves overall network performance and allows site leaders to receive information remotely and reliably.
DATA ANALYTICS
With sites dispersed around the globe, the lag time waiting for data to travel back to the company’s centralized data center, undergo analysis and direct actions back to the remote locations could be detrimental. By taking advantage of interconnected colocation at the edge, oil and gas companies benefit from ultra-low latency ensuring real-time, continuous analysis of data.
Netrality’s Houston data center, 1301 Fannin is located near sites belonging to several of the nation’s leading oil and gas companies, enabling ultra-low latency and high performance networking at the core of the market. To learn more about Netrality’s interconnected colocation facilities and how they facilitate digitization in the oil and gas industry, contact us.
