How to secure, access and utilise data in a distributed environment and changing world

Climate change and the push towards renewable energy sources only add to the complexity. In addition, energy companies are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks - recent research indicated that the energy sector is the most likely to pay cybercriminals’ ransom demands - significantly increasing the need for effective IT solutions.

IT teams in the energy sector are being challenged to navigate this landscape while also managing costs, ensuring network resilience, and keeping up with the latest technological advancements. Some of their concerns include:

Feeling the strain of significant data growth: Unstructured data on company file systems is growing inexorably, with employees struggling to find the information they need and data management becoming more complicated with the rising use of larger file formats like 4D Grappling with growing demands and lower budgets: IT teams needing to match data management strategies to changed budget priorities

Adopting modern technologies successfully: Companies are pushing to use smart technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) to gain quicker and greater insights into available energy reserves or anticipate market trends, but such solutions can increase IT infrastructure data loads, creating new accessibility issues Protecting against the ever-growing threat of ransomware: The continuously increasing threat of cyber attacks demands new approaches to ensure data security. For the energy industry, this brings acute challenges because its legacy IT infrastructures are hard to defend and modernise.

Priorities for data managementfive key tips

Modern cloud storage infrastructures and file data services can help address these priorities while delivering a series of game-changing operational benefits for challenging data management conditions. Here are five fundamental priorities that energy organisations’ IT managers should consider:

# 1 - Modernise infrastructure with cloud storage Explore supporting your organisation’s changing business growth initiatives with cloud-native infrastructures that deliver effective file access. These will help eliminate on-premise storage infrastructures and piecemeal connections for regional offices or hybrid working models that require constant maintenance. It’s reckoned that cloud storage delivers 60% savings over legacy infrastructures’ capital costs.

#2 - Replace static infrastructure with flexibility

Plan the shortest path from all locations, however extreme or remote. Cloud storage unites the data from multiple locations and does away with the need for manual back-ups to disk at local offices. The caching of active files for fast access means that all remote or offshore teams can be brought more effectively into collaborations and project work.

• #3 - Embrace a cloud-first approach

Shift to a cloud-first file data services strategy to manage business-critical scale in a flexible, cost-effective way – new offices and capacity can be added without the need for long planning cycles or budgeting for additional infrastructure management costs.

#4 - Favour modern approaches over traditional file backup

Create a golden master of all data using immutable objects – cloud platforms maintain immutable copies of every file and provide a local access point.

#5 - Take a holistic approach to tackling ransomware

Protect, detect, recover – deploy a fast and robust protection and recovery strategy at all levels of the stack - cloud storage systems and file data services deliver game-changing disaster recovery capabilities in the event of outages or malicious attacks because they can roll back to the exact point immediately before an incident to identify damaged files locally and complete file restoration often in minutes without the users even noticing – unlike legacy systems where damage assessment alone can take days.

Rapid recovery is a breakthrough for energy companies. The research by Sophos found that energy and utility companies typically recover less than two-thirds (62%) of information lost, even after paying cybercriminals’ ransoms.

Reaping the benefits of a modern approach to data management

Real-world examples show the impact of these five priorities in the field:

Global oil and gas services provider Penspen has undertaken more than 10,000 projects since its formation, and now has major offices in London, Mexico, Houston, Abu Dhabi, and Bangkok, with operations in over 100 different countries. The company modernised its infrastructure with the Nasuni File Data Platform, benefiting from unlimited capacity, enhanced data protection, and one global namespace. Nasuni, backed by Azure Blob storage, enabled a transition from traditional file server hardware and backup systems to a single file data services platform, giving the company a more agile, flexible infrastructure. The Nasuni cloud-native approach to file data enabled an