Executive summary
Oil and gas runs on complex data. Production reports, joint venture accounts, regulatory returns. These are not simple tasks. They involve large datasets, linked calculations, and rules that change. Off-the-shelf software rarely keeps up.
For many operators, on-premises systems have been the answer for decades. They were built for control and security at a time when cloud was new and moving data off-site felt like a risk.
That has changed. Keeping servers in-house means upgrade cycles, hardware costs, and slow response to change. It creates key person risk. It locks logic inside systems that only the vendor can touch. The cost of staying put has grown quietly, but steadily.
Cloud platforms have matured. Security, reliability, and audit trails are now standard. But the bigger shift is not about where data lives. It is about who controls the system. Today, the people who know oil and gas best: hydrocarbon accountants, production engineers, domain experts, can build and adapt their own systems. No developers. No vendor queues. No black-box logic.
This paper sets out why on-premises systems carry more risk than they appear to, what a cloud platform built for domain experts actually delivers, and what changes when your data team owns their own tools.
The need for change
Oil and gas operations are getting more complex. Assets are larger. Joint ventures are more common. Reporting rules change more often. According to Deloitte’s 2026 Oil and Gas Industry Outlook, digitally enabled operations are now the next frontier for competitiveness in the sector. Physical productivity gains are flattening. The edge is increasingly coming from how well companies manage their data.
The systems managing that data have not always kept pace.
Many operators still rely on on-premises platforms built years ago. At the time, they were the right choice. They offered structure, security, and control. But they were designed around fixed workflows. Change was possible, but it was slow and costly. Every update meant going back to the vendor.
That creates a problem. PwC’s 2026 Energy, Utilities and Resources outlook found that nearly 70% of oil and gas companies plan to restructure portfolios and divest non-core assets. Acquisitions happen. JV agreements change. Regulations shift. Each time, the data systems need to change too. With an on-premises platform, that process takes months. Sometimes longer. In the meantime, teams work around the gap. Spreadsheets fill in. Manual checks multiply. Risk quietly builds.
Spreadsheets are not the enemy here. They are popular for a reason. They are flexible, familiar, and under the control of the person using them. A hydrocarbon accountant who knows Excel can build something that reflects exactly how their operation works. That is genuinely valuable.
The problem is not just scale. A spreadsheet that solves one problem becomes fragile when that problem grows. It is hard to audit. Hard to secure. Hard to hand over when someone leaves. Even a single well-built spreadsheet carries risk if the person who built it is the only one who truly understands it. What starts as a practical solution becomes a liability over time.
Oil and gas teams need something that combines the best of both worlds. The flexibility and transparency of a spreadsheet. The security, scale, and reliability of an enterprise system. That is what modern cloud platforms now make possible.
A new approach
Thinking differently about data systems
Cloud is not a new idea. Most oil and gas professionals have heard the case for it many times. But the conversation has often focused on the wrong thing.
According to Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, 82% of enterprises have already adopted hybrid cloud. The debate about whether to move is largely settled. The more important question is what you do once you get there.
The typical argument for cloud is about infrastructure. Lower costs. No hardware to maintain. Automatic updates. These things matter, but they are not the real shift.
The real shift is about who controls the system. In a traditional on-premises setup, the vendor owns the logic. They built it. They understand it. When something needs to change, you go back to them. That creates a dependency that is easy to underestimate until something urgent needs to change and the queue is six months long.
Cloud platforms built for domain experts work differently. The logic lives with the people who understand the business. A hydrocarbon accountant can change a workflow. A production engineer can update a calculation. They do not need a software team.
For oil and gas teams managing complex assets, joint ventures, and regulatory obligations, that kind of control is not a nice-to-have. It is how you stay accurate, stay compliant, and stay ahead of change.
Services, not software
Traditional software is sold as a product. You buy it, install it, and manage it. Updates are scheduled events. Major changes are projects.
Cloud platforms work differently. You subscribe to a service. The vendor handles the infrastructure, the security, the updates, and the uptime. You focus on the work.
Consider what maintaining on-premises software actually requires. Server hardware needs to be procured, configured, and replaced on a cycle. Security patches need to be tested and applied. Backups need to be managed. When something breaks at month-end, someone has to fix it. That work falls on internal teams who would rather be focused on production data, not server logs.
A managed cloud service removes that burden. The platform is always current. Security is handled by specialists whose entire job is infrastructure. Uptime is a contractual commitment, not a hope.
There is also a less obvious benefit: the platform improves over time without disruption. New features are rolled out continuously. There are no upgrade projects, no version migrations, no compatibility issues to manage.
bp is one of the clearest examples of this shift in oil and gas. The company reports that over 95% of its data now lives on the cloud. It has identified data silos as a core challenge, with decades of well logs, operational reports, and financial data previously scattered across disparate systems. Moving to the cloud is not just about cost. It is about making data accessible and trustworthy across the business.
Power to the people who know the work
There is a well-known pattern in oil and gas data teams. The person who best understands how a process works is rarely the person who controls the system that runs it.
A hydrocarbon accountant knows exactly how production allocation should work. They know the contractual rules, the regulatory requirements, and the edge cases that only appear after years in the role. But if the system needs to change, they write a specification. That specification goes to a vendor. The vendor scopes the work. A project begins. Months pass.
This is not a technology problem. It is a design problem. The tools were not built for the people who understand the work.
Cloud platforms built on configurable, low-code architecture change that. Domain experts can build and adapt their own systems using skills they already have. In oil and gas, that typically means Excel-based logic: the language that hydrocarbon accountants, production engineers, and data analysts already think in.
This matters for two reasons. First, speed. When the person who understands the problem is also the person who can fix it, response times shrink from months to days. Second, accuracy. Systems built by domain experts reflect how operations actually work, not how a software team interpreted a specification. The logic is visible, inspectable, and owned by the people who depend on it.
Santos, one of Australia’s largest oil and gas producers, put it plainly. The value of a configurable platform is that you can see how it works, see where things go wrong, and update it yourself. Reversing a flow network, for example, is a configuration change rather than a vendor project. What would previously have meant a large bill is now handled internally.
The real cost of staying put
The case for moving to cloud is often framed as a cost saving. Lower infrastructure spend. Reduced IT headcount. Fewer upgrade projects. These savings are real. But they understate the actual cost of staying on legacy systems.
The more significant cost is operational risk. It builds slowly and quietly, and it rarely appears on a balance sheet until something goes wrong.
Consider what happens when a legacy system cannot keep pace with change. Workarounds appear. A spreadsheet fills the gap here. A manual process patches a hole there. Over time, these workarounds become load-bearing. Knowledge concentrates in the individuals who built them. When those people leave, the organisation carries a risk it may not fully understand.
This is key person dependency. It is one of the most common and least visible risks in oil and gas data operations. A system that requires one person to understand how it works is not a system. It is a liability.
Legacy platforms also create vendor dependency. When the logic sits inside proprietary software, the vendor controls the pace of change. Each regulatory update, new reporting requirement, or acquisition requires a conversation with the vendor, a scoping exercise, a project, and a wait. In a sector restructuring at the pace PwC describes, the ability to adapt quickly is not optional.
The contrast with a configurable platform is stark. As one Ancala Midstream team member described it, legacy systems are black boxes. If something fails, you phone the vendor and pay for support. With EnergySys, you open the log and fix it yourself, or bring in a partner of your choice. That shift from dependency to control is what changes the economics and the risk profile at the same time.
Ownership, not dependency
There is an important distinction between using a system and owning one.
Most legacy software is used, not owned. The vendor owns the architecture, the logic, and the roadmap. The customer pays to access it. When the customer’s needs diverge from the vendor’s priorities, the customer waits.
This model made sense when software required specialist engineering to build and maintain. It no longer does.
Configurable cloud platforms separate the platform from the solution. The vendor provides the infrastructure, the security, and the core toolset. The customer builds the application on top. That application reflects how their operation actually works. It is theirs to change, theirs to extend, and theirs to keep if they choose a different partner.
A system that can be adapted internally does not become obsolete when the business changes. It evolves with it. There are no sunk costs that make change feel too expensive. There is no version lock-in that forces an upgrade project every few years.
For oil and gas operators managing assets that may be in production for decades, that adaptability is not a feature. It is a fundamental requirement. The regulatory landscape will change. JV structures will change. Reporting obligations will change. The system needs to change with them, on the operator’s timeline, not the vendor’s.
Ownership is what makes that possible.
The cloud in action
The case for cloud is well established. But as Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, puts it: cloud is a means to an end, not the end itself. The question is not whether to move. It is what you are trying to achieve when you get there.
The organisations realising the greatest benefit share a common approach. They did not simply move existing systems to the cloud. They rethought who owns the logic, who builds the workflows, and who controls the data.
bp’s experience in oil and gas illustrates the scale of what changes. Well trajectory design, previously a process taking weeks or months, now takes less than a day. That is not a marginal efficiency gain. It is a change in how quickly operational teams can act on what they know.
For midstream operators, Ancala Midstream shows what ownership looks like in practice. Ancala runs critical North Sea infrastructure, including the Scottish Area Gas Evacuation pipeline and terminal. Before moving to EnergySys, the team had built a network of spreadsheets and custom databases around an ageing system that could no longer do what the business needed. The hydrocarbon accounting team was generating over 1,000 reports by hand.
After moving to a cloud platform, those reports became automated. Shippers and suppliers got self-service access to data. When new assets joined the SAGE system and emissions rules changed, the team updated the configuration themselves. No vendor. No project. No wait.
The shift to cloud also changed how Ancala serves its customers directly. The team was previously sending around 1,000 reports per day to the companies using their pipelines to buy and sell gas. Now those customers log into a portal and see their own data themselves. As one team member put it, that was only possible because EnergySys is cloud-based. It has been a huge thing for them. They also used the same platform to build an emissions tracking tool for their SAGE assets, giving the company and its supply chain visibility of their carbon footprint in one place.
The M&A context reinforces why speed of adaptation matters. TAQA acquired North Sea assets including the Brent Pipeline system and found that the inherited system could not handle the added complexity. They chose to replace it entirely, in a matter of months. EnergySys was live within the critical window. TAQA’s own team handled all allocation logic and reporting from day one. As one team member said: what they did, and how fast they did it, would not have been possible with any other tool.
For LNG operators, Atlantic LNG shows what the platform delivers at the production end. Atlantic operates four trains in Trinidad, each with its own rules for allocating LNG and NGLs across multiple pipelines and gas streams. EnergySys manages their full nomination and allocation process. A recent upgrade improved performance for key processes with no disruption to live operations.
Across all three cases, the pattern is the same. Complex operations. Systems that could not keep pace. Teams who needed to own and adapt their own tools. And results that only became possible when control was put in the right hands.
MIT Sloan’s research is clear that organisations which treat cloud as a strategic business decision, rather than a technology project, achieve substantially better outcomes. The organisations that struggle are those that move infrastructure without rethinking ownership, governance, or who is responsible for the logic inside their systems.
For oil and gas operators, the opportunity is significant. The complexity of the industry, the weight of regulatory obligation, and the pace of portfolio change all make the case for systems that domain experts can own and adapt. The technology to support that is available now. The question is whether organisations are willing to put it in the hands of the people who need it most.
Find out what your team could build
EnergySys is the configurable cloud platform for domain experts. It gives the people who understand your operations the tools to build, own, and adapt the systems your business runs on.
To explore the platform and see what it can do for your team, explore our platform pages, or get in touch at sales@energysys.com.
