One of the most important benefits of public cloud computing is its ability to scale without the need for major upfront investments. Cloud scaling is not limited to just growing one computing environment. It also enables adding regional computing centers worldwide with no financial outlay. For example, Microsoft Azure currently has over 60 announced cloud regions distributed worldwide that can be used to support the computing needs of geographically global companies.
A petroleum Exploration and Production (E&P) enterprise, with let’s say the headquarters located in Texas and an oil field in Latin America, may consider building a computing environment onsite or nearby the oil field to better support local operations. Why not make use of a public cloud region closely located to the oil field and another cloud region near the headquarters and have them communicate through a private high-speed cloud network?
This can easily be accomplished with public cloud computing with no initial capital investment. Additionally, all the computing best practices for network and cybersecurity are already included by the cloud service providers. What if a new oil field is exploited in Africa? Rinse and repeat, and apply the lessons learned from one cloud deployment to the other.
As a bonus, many cloud service providers have adopted net-zero and carbon neutrality strategies for their cloud data centers. Petroleum companies could find these characteristics interesting for their computing environments.
Although the necessary tools and infrastructure are provided by the cloud service providers to implement globally distributed computing, it is still important for any cloud user to get the architecture right. If globally distributed cloud computing is, or should be, on your horizon please feel free to contact us to discuss how to best architect and deploy it.
