Oil & Gas Leader Overcomes Legacy System and Data Security Challenges with Azure iPaas Integration
INDUSTRY
Oil & Gas
REVENUE
Privately Held
At a Glance
Oil and Gas companies extract oil and process it into products to fuel the global economy, but they face numerous challenges while doing so. They range from industry-specific challenges such as scarcity of resources, an increased preference for oil alternatives, to antiquated legacy systems, security threats to sensitive data, ensuring compliance with global, national, and state regulations, and more. These challenges can significantly slow down operations and impact productivity and efficiency. Hence, they need to be uprooted and resolved as soon as possible.
Technology plays a crucial role in optimizing operational activities and can resolve several challenges simultaneously. The seamless integration of systems and data specifically can help these firms better adapt to market changes and demands, automate manual labor, build better quality products, optimize processes, improve accuracy, and more. In this case study, we will discuss how cloud services helped automate and streamline operations for an Oil and Gas company.
About the Client
Our client, ‘Multinational Energy Corporation (MEC)’, is a global mid and downstream oil corporation. They are primarily involved in refining, storing, supplying, and retailing a wide range of petroleum products. With operations in over 47 countries, our client provides fuel to leading airlines and power suppliers. Their operations comprise hundreds of storage terminals, 3000+ retail locations, and over 80 airports. The numerous operational data points in MEC’s storehouses capture and accumulate enormous amounts of data.
A Partnership that Stands the Test of Time
Our association with MEC goes back nearly a decade when we connected over a mutual interest in technology and its widespread impact. What began as a simple IT project has transformed into a deep and long-lasting partnership. Over the years we deepened our understanding of their operations etc. and engaged on numerous initiatives including a data lake solution, data virtualization leveraging Microsoft Power BI, and more.
However, with the complacency of legacy solutions, the need for enhanced security, and a simplified ecosystem, we proceeded to understand and resolve the growing complexities in operational data.
The Need for Speed and Power
Multinational Energy Corporation’s operational data includes sensitive and proprietary data such as oil prices, government contracts, geographical and seismic data about oil exploration, distribution, and financials. They developed technical systems to make this data secure, easily accessible, and capable enough to process a high volume of messages spanning across multiple business domains. However, this was not the only data they generated. MEC has oil terminals worldwide, some self-owned and some rentals. Naturally, the technical ecosystem of self-owned and rental terminals was not identical. For better collaboration and synchronization, they needed a reliable technical solution that captured and standardized terminal data (orders received, processed, inventory updates, oil temperature, etc.). The new solution also needed to empower the client team with:
Resolving Business Challenges with Technology
Our journey began with a lean team of engineers and architects. It later expanded to include software quality assurance engineers, DevOps experts, and cloud specialists to form a 70-member team. Our team of engineers reviewed the entire scenario and consulted on a hybrid integration that included on-premise infrastructure coupled with the power of cloud.
We recommended using Azure iPaaS to integrate multiple systems and create business documents. The Azure iPaaS framework would consider various Azure services such as Azure API Management, Azure Function Apps, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Cosmos DB & Azure Service Bus. One of the core concepts we leveraged was a minimalistic component approach that avoided utilizing all the bells and whistles available to reduce complexity.
The Journey to iPaaS
The Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a set of automated tools for connecting software applications that are deployed in different environments. iPaaS is often used by large business-to-business (B2B) enterprises that need to integrate on-premises applications and data with cloud applications and data.
Simply put, an iPaaS is a cloud integration Platform as a Service, enabling connectivity to SaaS and cloud services and providing a secure method of accessing on-premises applications behind a firewall. An iPaaS can solve the problem of cloud silos by providing businesses with a way to integrate cloud-based services, and with on-premises enterprise applications in a hybrid integration model.
The iPaaS solution for Multinational Energy Corporation is built upon multiple applications. These applications connect for creating business documents (Order, Invoice, Customer etc.). Some applications reside on an on-premise network, and others are available on an external network (cloud). To integrate the disconnected systems, they needed an integration system that worked as middleware, accepted the request on behalf of the destination system, and sent back the response to the source system, and vice versa.
In the iPaaS integration, we combined the power of several Azure components such as Azure API management, Azure Active Directory, Azure Service, Azure Function App, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure SQL, Azure Key Vault, Azure Virtual Network, Azure Active Directory, Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Service Bus etc.
Leveraging the above components and their features, executives at the rental terminals now perform the following technical tasks with ease:
iPaaS: Delivering Massive Benefits
With the additional technologies and technical components integrated into their existing ecosystem, the benefits came running in. Integrations with order, terminal, trip management, document generation, and management enabled MEC teams to leverage enhanced speed, compute power, simplified operations, and other advantages such as:
- Published standby set of function apps/services
- Even if any service in the primary region fails, the traffic manager re-routes traffic to secondary region
- Hassle-free data recovery in case of any outage
- Identity certificate checks encryptions
- Access control
- Compliance certifications
- Entry restricted to limited IPs
Business Impact: Communication, Collaboration, and more
iPaaS integration enabled Multinational Energy Corporation with seamless integration of its data and systems across numerous oil terminals across the globe. This technology empowered their teams to improve the scale of their operations. Moreover, with advanced monitoring and analytics, business decisions related to terminal operations are now accurate and well-informed. Reduced bottlenecks, enhanced terminal operations, optimized processes, and improved efficiency are now an everyday affair.
The business impact does not end here. The most dramatic difference in business and operations lies with the introduction of new systems and automation of previously manual systems. Earlier, a unified system to process orders, deliveries, accounts payables and receivables included extensive manual labor and errors. Today, the MEC team benefits from automated order generation, processing, accurate data entry, integration with ERP systems, invoice generation, and more. With iPaaS integration, thousands of daily emails have been replaced with a few clicks. Naturally, this has led to significant time, effort, and cost savings in their day-to-day operations. These savings free up their executives’ time for more value-driven activities.
The Partnership Continues with Mutual Learning and Support
The successful deployment and integration leveraging Azure iPaaS has helped MEC gain some of the most sought-after business benefits from cloud implementation. They have become better positioned to make more informed business decisions, reduce time and cost spent, replace manual labor, and improve productivity. Because of our ongoing technical contributions, MEC has made us their preferred technology partner. Along with new deployments, we ensure technology support and maintenance and continue to witness their achievements and milestones.
