Hess Corp. is undergoing a large-scale migration to public cloud as it works to cut costs and boost efficiency in the face of low energy prices and prepare for growing volumes of data from sensor-laden equipment.
CIO Zhanna Golodryga and her team are making a concerted push to deliver much of the energy supplier’s IT “as a service” so staff can focus on core business activities, such as working with drilling data or seismic information that helps the company determine the size and locations of oil and gas wells.
She also hopes it will free up time to focus on managing fields of oil wells and other assets equipped with data-emitting sensors.
“Pretty much anything and everything we’re setting up, they have sensors,” Ms. Golodryga said. “The volumes of data that we’re going to see coming from the Internet of Things … is going to be an absolutely transformational opportunity.”
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Hess first began moving applications to the cloud as it divested its downstream business a few years ago. Today, more than 50% of Hess’ “cloud friendly” workloads have been moved.
That includes applications that don’t require the on-premise high-performance computing cluster, data processing tools and software-as-a-service offerings. Hess is about a year into a five-year agreement with Accenture to move applications and servers to the cloud.
The company’s ERP system and high-performance computing cluster remain on-premise for now. Ms. Golodryga’s team is working on risk assessments and proof of concepts for a planned cloud move, but hasn’t started a big migration.
Ms. Golodryga described Hess’ IT environment as a “hybrid” mix of private and public cloud services, but said the company increasingly looks to public cloud. Accenture declined to name any of the public cloud vendors being used with Hess, but the consulting firm has said it works with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.
Hess isn’t considering any new non-cloud offerings unless there is no cloud-based alternative, Ms. Golodryga said. “I don’t see a big future in the large data center.”
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