Article

Azure in the oil and gas industry: Technology and career options

by Jeff Christman
Senior Consultant, Cloud Security

As an IT professional in Houston, I have had opportunities in the past to apply Azure technology to oil and gas projects at a large midstream company. As one of the largest such firms,  the company was setting up SCADA equipment and IoT to monitor end-to-end operations at a refinery, all the way from pulling petroleum from the ground to shipping it to gas stations. Azure helped to connect SCADA and IoT devices to monitor pipelines. If you've ever seen a big control room in a movie, that's essentially what we were hooking up.

What sort of Azure services do energy companies commonly use?

IoT capabilities are one of the most common cloud opportunities, given the amount of industrial technology involved. Energy companies commonly use Azure Data Lake, Machine Learning, and High Performance Computing. These technologies help with analyzing large datasets of seismic data. Additionally, AI Analytics has an important role to play.

An oil and gas company may have hundreds of sensors in the ground for a project, connected with a shipping container serving as a mini data center.  Data from the sensors is sent to satellites to be analyzed elsewhere. Seismic devices create mini-earthquakes with explosives to generate seismic data. When I was there, the company had several of these shipping-container-size data center projects deployed all over the world.

The regulatory environment

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Azure Compute Data Management Development Energy Field Service Integration Internet of Things (IoT) Oil
About Jeff Christman

Jeff Christman is a distinguished Navy Veteran boasting more than two decades of expertise in the Information Technology sector. He possesses a specialized focus on cloud migration projects, having contributed his skills to prestigious organizations including Raytheon, AT&T, and NASA. Presently, he holds the position of Senior Cloud Security Consultant at a prominent consulting firm. Beyond his professional endeavors, Jeff is an accomplished author and educator, developing and publishing content and courses for renowned platforms such as Pluralsight.com, Techsnips.io, and Adamtheautomator.com.

Outside of his professional pursuits, Jeff enjoys engaging in fantasy football, exploring advancements in technology, and playfully teasing his teenage daughters.

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