NUPRC
Digital Transformation Initiative
Industry : Oil & Gas / Energy
Business Problem
Scalability, cost, innovation, agility, security, and business
Commercial Impact
Reduction in cost of running and managing IT infrastructure
Microsoft Solution
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Partner
Reliance Infosystems
Abstract
The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) is a significant organization in Nigeria’s petroleum sector, NUPRC has the statutory responsibility of ensuring compliance of stakeholders to Nigerian’s petroleum laws, regulations and guidelines in the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector.
As part of NUPRC’s future readiness strategy, they identified tenant migration as one of the key foundation areas for rapid innovation and business agility. To achieve this NUPRC engaged the services of Reliance Infosystems as their Migration and Implementation partner to support this journey.
Upon completion of the engagement, NUPRC can fully utilize the cloud to take advantage of high-availability, agility and security as the deployed solutions provide resiliency and global reachability which is in line with NUPRC’s vision – to become a 21st century Regulator operating in line with International best practices in the Upstream Oil and Gas sector.
Understanding The Problem
Before the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) transitioned to the multi-tenant Azure cloud environment, they faced several challenges that hindered their business operations. This included complexity due to shared resources with sister company, scalability limitations, which restricted their growth and adaptability. They also grappled with high infrastructure costs that strained their budget, and inadequate business continuity and disaster recovery solution. NURPC’S ability to innovate and remain agile and flexible was diminished.
Additionally, they aimed to achieve increased security and compliance risks, which threatened their operations. Lastly, their business continuity and resilience was inadequate, this posed a risk to their ability to recover from incidents. Outlined below are some of the challenges NUPRC faced:
- Scalability: flexible scaling options in NUPRC’s IT infrastructure was a significant challenge. It was not just difficult to predict future resources need and provision resources, approval for both was another bottleneck, and sourcing the additional server/compute or storage was as well a challenge. As such, both expected and unexpected demand spike was disruptive to their operations.
- Cost: The inadequate use of azure reserved instance and azure hybrid benefits led to significant infrastructure cost which was projected to increase even more.
- Innovation: NURPC required a nimble platform, that allows for innovation, modernization, and a cohesive development tool chain, this amongst other requirements was a significant driver in leveraging Microsoft Azure. With these in mind, there was a need to optimize, modernize their applications, Databases and decoupling of monoliths on their Microsoft Azure tenant/subscriptions, to leverage innovative services, enable rapid experimentation, development, and deployment.
- Agility: Development, deployment and testing of new applications or services took time due to manual processes, testing, and coordination. This hugely had a negative impact on NUPRC’s time to market, and as a result could not respond to market changes that require new IT resources.
- Security: The team at NUPRC found it especially challenging to keep up with the security requirements of their digital estate, and enforcement of industry standard governance mechanisms/policies, amongst other specific needs of dealing with specific complexities in providing advanced network protection, Web Application protection, Firewalls, SIEM/SOAR, EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) etc. As well as Governance/Compliance requirement for the entire digital estate.
- Business Continuity: The goal of BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) is to limit risk and get an organization running as close to normal after an unexpected interruption; NUPRC could not efficiently ensure business continuity and quick recovery from disaster during a data corruption, disaster, or any other disruptive event.
How We Got The Job Done
To fully understand the existing environment, Reliance assessed and catalogued every application, data, workload and gauged their readiness for tenant migration to Azure.
After careful consideration with necessary stakeholders in NUPRC the most optimal strategy that ensured the achievement of the immediate and long-term objectives of the organization was agreed upon and approved by appropriate stakeholders.
Leveraging several Azure tools, Reliance successfully moved the virtual machines, databases, and other services across different azure tenants. Given the complex nature of the customer’s environment, ensuring minimal disruption and modernization of their workload was a daunting task, but Reliance Infosystems was up to the challenge.
Once the tenant migration was completed, we fine-tuned the resources for performance and cost, and agreed with NUPRC’s on a system for proactive and regular review and monitoring of the new environment. The last mile for this engagement were sessions to confirm the key business objectives set out at the start of this engagement were achieved, and subsequently, knowledge transfer.
Our customer engagement strategy goes beyond simply deploying the solutions, as such we provide an ongoing support for NURPC team.
Reliance Market Differentiation
Reliance Infosystems differentiated itself in the marketplace through its industry insight and unique blend of technical acumen in addressing customers’ challenges and delivering value beyond their expectations.
In meeting NUPRC’s requirements, Reliance leveraged its specialized expertise in Azure cloud solutions to meet the customer’s need for tenant migration. The deployment showcased our capability for not just implementing technology, but also for envisioning a strategic roadmap aligned with the customer’s immediate and long-term goals.
The added value from Reliance was evident in our commitment to collaborative partnership, on-going support, and continuous knowledge-sharing to ensure alignment with industry best practices.
As a result, NUPRC team is empowered to not just provide necessary services to their stakeholder in the mid/downstream sector of the oil and gas value chain but to scale resources when needed while ensuring fault tolerance and reliability.
Engagement with Microsoft
NURPC’s objective for this project was beyond just azure tenant migration, this was a strategic move to rein IT infrastructure costs, empower their team for easy scalability, innovation, and ensure infrastructure fault tolerance.
Reliance Infosystems was able to successfully deliver the future state the customer envisioned – with the support of the team at Microsoft inclusive of Babajide Adeyemo.
Furthermore, Microsoft account team and Azure strategists were involved from the beginning of the project till the end, to provide context where necessary, and ensure timelines were met, with keen attention on the details of execution by Reliance Infosystems team, with this support Reliance Infosystems was able to swiftly navigate key customer conversations which invariably set the tone for the success all stakeholders experienced in the course of this engagement.
This project is a testament to our dedication to our customers’ success, to technical readiness as evidenced in our Advanced specialization in cloud migration and to the mutual trust and collaboration with the Microsoft team.
Removing Deployment Complexities
Over the years, Reliance Infosystems has worked on numerous projects of this nature, so we had a clear understanding of what it took to successfully and satisfactorily deliver this engagement to achieve NUPRC’s objectives. That said, every customer is unique and so is their IT environment. Through our human centered approach to customer engagements, we got a good grasp of what made NUPRC’s technical environment unique and how success is defined for the various stakeholders.
The Migration of NUPRC’s Applications and Databases across different Azure tenants introduced some levels of complexities, especially with integrations, and security primarily. The data platform (databases) was modernized from in-Virtual Machine SQL to Azure SQL database and will progressively move into SQL Managed Instance.
Monolithic applications were also decoupled, whilst some were not refactored but rather rehosted. The solutions were designed with backup and disaster recovery in mind. NUPRC can recover from system failures or downtime by restoring backup or failing over services.
Our proactive approach and meticulous execution ensured a smooth transition, bolstering the system’s resilience and minimizing potential disruption.
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