Four benefits of migrating your production data management to the cloud
Nobody knows exactly what the energy industry looks like in ten years. McKinsey’s Global Energy Perspective 2025 makes the point plainly: there’s no single path through the transition, and outcomes vary widely depending on policy, affordability, and regional priorities. Their oil demand scenarios for 2050 span a range wide enough to fit entire business strategies inside.
For anyone running production data management, that uncertainty is the point. You can’t predict which assets, partners, regulations, or reports you’ll be dealing with in five years. What you can do is make sure your system can change when they do. That’s the real case for moving away from a legacy system, and here are four benefits of doing so.
1. Control and transparency
There’s no one-size-fits-all requirement for an asset portfolio, so your production data management solution has probably been heavily customised over the years. The result is usually complexity and a lack of transparency. You’re forced to trust the system is doing its job, because nobody can see inside it. And every change means going back to software engineers, at their pace and their price.
A configurable cloud platform flips that. On EnergySys, the logic is built in the language your team already speaks: Excel. In place of a programming language like Java or C#, standard spreadsheet functions and formulas perform all calculations. Anyone on your team can create, modify, or review the application logic. They can inspect the detail behind any result, and review a full log of every calculation run and every change to any data item.
That’s not just a nicer way to work. It’s an audit trail your regulators, joint venture partners, and internal teams can actually follow. When someone asks how a number was derived, you have the answer.
2. Flexibility for whatever comes next
Mergers and acquisitions. New assets and decommissioned ones. Changing board reports. Regulations that didn’t exist when your system was built. Whatever the next decade holds, your software requirements will keep moving.
Customising a legacy system to keep pace means engineering costs that climb every year. On a configurable platform, your own domain experts make the changes, on your schedule rather than your vendor’s roadmap.
The platform’s built-in calculation engine means business rules are configured with Excel formulae. Workflows link processes together and run automatically on predefined events or schedules. Reports and dashboards get built as they’re needed. When requirements change, the person who understands why is the person who updates the system, often the same day.
3. A head start from templates and partners
A platform built for domain experts has an obvious appeal: the person who defines the requirements can build the system to meet them. The practical catch is that those experts already have day jobs.
That’s where partners come in. They’re domain experts too, with deep experience of the platform, of integrating it with external systems like data historians, and of building automations and reports. They can deliver your implementation with you, using the same tools you’d use yourself.
Partners can also provide template applications as a foundation that covers many aspects of upstream operations: production accounting, cargo dispatching, pipeline transportation, marine vetting, partner-operated assets, and emissions tracking and reporting. You can run them as delivered, or modify them to fit exactly. Either way, nothing is locked. Our solutions pages show what these look like in practice.
4. Lower total cost of ownership
Supporting legacy software is expensive in ways that rarely appear on one invoice. On-premises infrastructure to procure and maintain. IT time to keep it all running. And because your system is customised, you shoulder the development and upgrade costs alone.
Migrating to a cloud platform removes the hardware and the infrastructure overhead entirely. Upgrades arrive automatically, included in the subscription, without touching your applications, because your configuration is stored separately from the product code. No more upgrade projects every time the underlying software needs updating. We’ve written about what those upgrade projects really cost, and why they don’t have to exist at all.
Add the lower cost of building and changing applications, and over the life of the system, the total cost of ownership drops considerably.
The system should be the least of your worries
The next decade of energy is uncertain by every serious forecast. Your production data management system shouldn’t add to that uncertainty. It should be the thing that absorbs it: adapting to new assets, new rules, and new questions without a project, a consultant, or a wait.
If you’re weighing up a move, our Why PaaS page explains how the platform model works, and our production operations page shows what it handles day to day.
