How BP made its IT future-ready with a hybrid cloud infrastructure

BP's cloud journey began with digital communications

The IT team began its cloud journey by moving BP’s digital communications infrastructure to the cloud. 

Its website is hosted on the cloud environment, as part of an end-to-end cloud platform delivering digital communication services.

But it was not as simple as picking a cloud provider and sticking the communications system on its platform.

“We wanted best-of-breed cloud solutions for every feature, but there is no single provider that can offer the best technological solution for each of our needs,” said Deasy. “It is difficult to pick one service that fits all use cases.”

The IT team chose nine cloud service providers to provide a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to meet its cloud requirements.

The IaaS platform, delivered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is designed to auto-scale, according to Deasy.

Cloud agility in action

Using cloud’s agility for digital communications proved beneficial for BP during the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Considered as one of the largest oil spills, the incident led to several environmental incidents, such as endangering marine life and locals in the area.

“During the oil incident we had to suddenly provision more IT resources,” said Deasy.

According to the company’s chief cloud architect, Paul McMohan, during the oil spill visitors to its website increased from 15,000 to 17 million. “That was the scale we had to provision for,” he told Computer Weekly.

The cloud platform gave BP the ability to meet those demands. “Use of cloud in digital services also gave us the ability to put out new marketing campaigns quickly during that time,” said Deasy.

Although it is public cloud provider Amazon’s service, it is a virtual private cloud (VPC). Amazon VPC allows users to provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch resources in a virtual network that you define. “A majority of AWS customers are demanding Amazon VPC,” said McMohan.

Another service the BP team moved to the cloud was its global email services. BP has 160,000 mail boxes and nearly 10 million email transactions in a month.

“We decided to deliver our email services through private cloud PaaS [platform as a service],” said Deasy. “Today, our employees have a Google-like email experience,” he said.

BP put Microsoft Exchange 2010 into a private cloud from T-Systems in 2012 to benefit from pay-per-use functionality and flexibility. 

Overcoming cloud obstacles and looking forward

But BP’s cloud implementation was not without its obstacles. “There was cost, there were legal and regulatory requirements, and we had to develop a new approach to security,” said Deasy.

One of the toughest challenge was to let go of the control of IT, he said. It takes a lot of confidence to believe in a service that is not physically there to see.

Having benefited from cloud’s agility and scalability, BP’s IT team is now building a technology strategy to look at the cloud ecosystem. “When we started, AWS was leading and we were testing and developing our services using its services. But now, the cloud marketplace is evolving fast,” said McMohan.

The company is assessing AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud services. “We are also looking at traditional service providers, such as IBM, and then there is OpenStack which is maturing too,” he said.

BP is building a cloud framework and a rule book as guidance to its future cloud use.

“In the coming years, we will expand our cloud deployment for a wider range of applications,” said Deasy.

Embracing BYOD in a big way

BP’s IT focus is not restricted to the use of cloud alone. It has adopted a BYOD policy too.

“Two years ago we decided to embrace BYOD,” said Deasy. The petroleum company today has about 20,000 devices in use under its BYOD policy.

Image courtesy of BP plc