19Jan - March 2021 of the business, the place those technologies will become most transformative will be in handling the data which comes back from the field to analyze it and make the results available to the right people at the right time.When you look at the sensor data already available today and then think about the potential growth in that data as the Internet of Things adds sensors to everything else in the oilfield, on pipelines, in trucks, on equipment and generally to things we can't even dream of today, it is no wonder people are planning their strategy and infrastructure to scale.Leveraging VirtualizationI came out of the telecom industry a few years ago, and the new technologies that were emerging there was called Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN). At a high level, think of NFV as virtualization of networking gear. SDN allows your switching gear to direct or drop packets based on applications. For example, rather than having a dedicated firewall, an application could monitor your network for suspicious traffic and simply drop it at the edge or at the source based on instructions to the appropriate SDN switch. Though a carrier network, such as a cellular network, has much more complex equipment than the average enterprise, the concepts, once they become available on enterprise grade gear, will simplify managing our networks as much as virtualization has simplified managing our severs and applications.SPE's systems are almost completely virtualized. When you automate the deployments of both the virtual machines and the applications running on them, it provides an incredible speed and flexibility which allows you to solve redundancy, capacity, deployment and interoperability issues in ways that were never possible before.In many ways virtualization allows a more real-time reactive approach to things such as scaling which, in the past, took much more precise planning and testing, usually resulting in stranded resources if you wanted to sleep at night. Now you can add resources or redeploy them as needed real time.For me, the transformation brought about by mobile and then smartphones is a great analogy. Mobile phones in general and especially smart phones allow you to plan just enough in advance to start on a journey then adjust as you go along. You can make general plans to meet people, and then call them to lock the plans down as you get closer to them while using GPS to find and travel to your destination. Virtualization allows you to take a similar approach to deploying a new application. You can plan enough to get you started then adjust the environment as you gain more knowledge from real-world deployments.Technology Disruption at Brisk PaceThe oil and gas industry already uses many technologies, but the speed of transformation over the next few years will be breathtaking. Devices and sensors have dropped to price points where they are practical in most situations. Big data systems, while still maturing, have become reliable enough to handle the data generated by those sensors. That combination will fundamentally transform how we do things. Amidst this, one of the biggest challenge is on the cyber risk management front, especially with the emergence of the Internet of Things. We must not only secure the increasing number of connected devices but also ensure that the information flowing to and from those devices doesn't get tampered with in transit.My advice to budding technologists would be to fasten their seat belts (safety first in this industry) and get ready for a fun but fast-paced ride. John Boden
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