Case Study – Oil and Gas

Background

The Oil and Gas Industry (like most industries) has pledged to drive business and energy efficiencies with a focus on environmental considerations. In order to achieve energy efficiency the industry requires real-time data and monitoring of all sites, including remote sites to optimise business processes, be quicker to respond to leaks or equipment failure as it arises, and to reduce energy consumption in day to day operations. There is therefore a transformation in security, risk and data management systems with companies urgently requiring material upgrades of hardware and software. Firms are building migration plans to shift from legacy perimeter and hardware-centric offerings to a SASE architecture. To enable and secure anywhere, anytime access, network and network security must become software-defined, cloud-delivered and/or private point-to-point networks, forcing changes in architecture and vendor selection. The adoption of zero trust security architectures and remote location transformation projects — including software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) offload, internet-only operations — are accelerating the adoption of secure access service edge (SASE) but how to do this fast, securely and within a manageable budget?

Problem

Traditional perimeter-based approaches to securing anywhere, anytime access has forced rigid routing of network traffic through multiple disparate on-premises security chokepoints. This results in complexity for security administrators and inconsistent security experiences for users. Oil and Gas Companies typically have a range of legacy devices and data systems. Cloud alone is not a solution because of security concerns. Also, movement of data out of the cloud is very expensive and does not suit their requirements to constantly monitor their networks across a wide and often remote area. They need a solution that can cover old tech through to latest tech, not be disruptive to install and provide world class security and produce real time network monitoring.