There are various reasons for energy companies to migrate to and modernise on cloud. Controlling costs by eliminating the overhead of data centre operations. Shifting spending from capital budgets to operational expenditure matched to actual use. Overcoming the limitations of legacy infrastructure. Strengthening security – cloud environments often provide features that are continuously updated, helping to protect against the latest cyber threats.
There’s another benefit that doesn’t always make it onto everyone’s list – accelerating enterprise agility, which is a utility’s ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Yet it is possibly the most compelling reason of all as it underpins long-term success.
Enterprise agility enables utilities to thrive in energy markets undergoing rapid and remarkable change in all dimensions. These include the need to decarbonise, network decentralisation, the disruption of geopolitical instability, growing security threats, tightening regulatory pressures and demand changes caused by many factors from electrical vehicle charging to the cost-of-living crisis.
By being more agile, energy companies will be better positioned to meet such challenges and take advantage of new opportunities the moment they arise. Deep and rapid transformation of the energy sector calls for power companies to develop and launch new capabilities with short time to market. Enterprise agility allows utilities to more easily:
- Fulfil rising customer demands
- Tap into new revenue streams
- Reduce time to market
- Improve margins
- Eliminate waste and cut costs
- Achieve regulatory compliance
Cloud-based operations are an essential ingredient of agility
But how does cloud enable such agility?
One of the most obvious ways is the ability of cloud deployments to be scaled in minutes to match changing demand and enable business initiatives to be rolled out more rapidly. In contrast, legacy IT cannot add capacity quickly and offers limited scope for innovation.
Cloud offers increased resilience, better access management and automated patching and log monitoring which can release skilled IT resources from mundane operational tasks to focus on higher value initiatives that address changing market needs.
Cloud also allows energy companies to collect, store and analyse vast quantities of data more readily. Managing and making use of large-scale data is vital for customer retention and churn prevention. Customer services driven by data insights, automation and employee experience are essential for loyalty to drive growth and efficiencies. In networks, data insights help to optimise supply and demand and identify potential issues earlier.
The adoption of cloud-native principles is also the only realistic way energy companies can execute innovative digital strategies. Modernised, cloud-native apps open up innovation by taking advantage of advanced data analytics and other capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital twins and augmented reality to enable continuous product development.
Energy companies that achieve large-scale migration to the cloud are better placed to take advantage of the new open-data environment that will support the transition to net zero. Furthermore, evolving to cloud-native architecture principles and capabilities is essential to achieve the high level of automation and agility that utilities need to create the innovation and flexible operating models essential for future growth.
To help energy companies achieve the enterprise agility outcomes they need, NTT DATA provides a wide range of cloud application and infrastructure advisory services, system integration, architecture design and deployment services tailored to gas and power companies across all stages of the journey.
To find out more how NTT DATA can help you build enterprise agility capabilities by migrating to the cloud, book a 45 minute cloud consultation.