Shift to Cloud Hosted GIS, a Cost-Efficient Solution for Oil and Gas Operations
The energy industry in Alberta consumes over 40% of the entire geomatics research and development within Canada. It is not surprising that geospatial applications are a leading trend within the oil and gas industry as more companies embrace the advantages they provide, such as improved drilling efficiency, reduced downtime, and predict hazardous situations. However, as technology evolves, it is important for companies to stay up-to-date on innovative changes regarding geospatial applications.
Change is constant and unavoidable, therefore, companies within the oil and gas industry need to plan and prepare for the efficiencies and cost savings new technology provides. One way to ensure that your company can adopt these new technologies is to shift away from high cost and resource-heavy in-house solutions to affordable and fully hosted and managed cloud solutions. i-Open Technologies identified the challenges of traditional in-house servers and have provided resources to help make the adoption seamless.
The cost of acquisition, limited access to real-time data capture, technical difficulties, and time consumption to update or share data are all difficulties that are addressed and solved by hosting your geospatial application in the cloud. Especially for oil and gas companies who have a limited budget, these key advantages of cloud-hosted GIS are going to set the pace for any future technology investments you make.
Illustration of cloud-hosted GIS and its accessibility benefits.
Easy Access to Data & Reliability
In contrast to installing your GIS in an in-house server, cloud-hosted GIS enables access to data from anywhere at any time and from any device. This allows flexibility, ease of work collaboration, and facilitate workflow.
The ability to have your geospatial application hosted in the cloud enables SaaS and managed service providers such as i-Open Technologies, to become a champion for your existing IT department providing invaluable data maintenance and management services as well as making advanced analytics possible to drive decisions without the administrator and infrastructure overhead.
Cloud-hosted GIS is also more reliable and secure. Managing on-premise solutions is a constant battle of maintenance, availability, capacity planning, and hardware depreciation. The time taken to plan, execute and administer these cumbersome systems can be a drain on existing IT resources. Hosting your geospatial applications in the cloud does not present these challenges for your company allowing you to focus on your core operations. Why is this an advantage? It saves you money.
Lower Cost
On-premises servers have a high acquisition cost plus the additional mandatory software license maintenance costs that take place periodically. But there’s more cost that goes into using on-premise solutions as they require updates and constant administration. Here are some expenses that are incurred when using on-site servers, but eliminated when using cloud-hosted GIS for your geospatial application:
- Initial cost – used to purchase server
- Maintenance/Licensing cost – used to renew licenses and entire set up periodically
- Labor cost – administering, developing, patching, and monitoring systems.
- Opportunity cost – cost of lost business and productivity in the event of an outage or unplanned downtime
- Hardware and software obsolescence and depreciation – maintaining up to date and vendor-supported systems is a consistent cycle of expenditures.
With Cloud GIS, these expenses are eliminated. Your data is made available by simply logging in on a browser. No infrastructure to maintain resulting in a reduction of cost.
Easy and Real-Time Data Updates
In a rapidly evolving tech era, it is important to consider innovative solutions that are available to drive efficiencies, cost savings, compliance, and decisions. These solutions are already being used by larger companies but cost-prohibitive for medium and smaller companies. However, the newest technology is now available at a fraction of the cost and can accommodate and implement new updates and changes swiftly when applications are cloud-hosted. This makes innovative updates affordable for oil and gas companies of any size.
Implementing, updating, and integrating applications on Cloud GIS doesn’t require the heavy lift of resetting and coding your server. You can have real-time data captured and displayed in a single unified platform promptly. This enables accurate geospatial analysis for better decision making.
Three very important points to take away from this brief insight on cloud-hosted geospatial applications are that it:
- Is very cost-efficient giving access to all the benefits to any size company.
- Allows for easy collaboration with companies such as i-Open Tech who provide fully hosted and managed GIS.
- Puts your company in the position to never fall behind in implementing newer and better innovative solutions.
If you have any questions or inquiries regarding cloud-hosted GIS, send us a message or visit oilandgasoperations.ca and we will be more than happy to further discuss and provide insight.