The global oil and gas industry is incessantly subject to increasing business pressures, including rising operating costs and market fluctuation. Therefore, companies aim to gain advantage by finding innovative methods to achieve cost efficiencies. Industrial automation, control and safety systems used in the oil and gas sector are to a large extent digitised and dependent on digital technology.
Advanced digital technologies can help gather the data required for oil and gas operators to increase production while decreasing costs. According to a McKinsey & Company report, the potential impact of using advanced analytics for predictive maintenance can decrease maintenance costs by up to 13 per cent. Also, by integrating digital applications, companies have been able to increase their reservoir limits significantly, resulting in a decrease of up to 20 per cent in upstream and downstream capital expenditures.
Asset monitoring, management and geo-mapping are only some of the areas which require real-time access in harsh environments. Therefore, making sure oil and gas staff have the right device along with monitoring and analysis software can be the crucial difference in profitability and uptime that keeps a company moving ahead of its competitors.
However, computing devices need to not only survive the harsh environments of the sector, but to do so securely. Although oil and gas companies are benefiting from digitalisation, it has also significantly increased the vulnerability of networks.
Today, the networks that connect process equipment and control systems are based on internet technology. Further, the need to transfer production data to information systems means the physical separation that was there in the past is no longer practically possible. There is also an increasing use of remote operation which may lead to the use of shared computer networks.
The consequences of unwanted incidents based on digital vulnerabilities is primarily of a financial nature. Production has to be shut down, and this means a loss of income for the company. But even if oil and gas companies deploy secure applications and communications protocols to protect their network, they also need to consider the devices that are connected to it. According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, the deployment of cybersecurity measures in the oil and gas industry isn’t keeping pace with the growth of digitalisation in the operational technology (OT) environment.
In fact, just 35 per cent of the study’s respondents said their organisation’s OT cyber readiness was high. Most respondents described their organisation as having low to medium cybersecurity readiness and 68 per cent of respondents said their operations had at least one security compromise, resulting in the loss of confidential information or OT disruption.
When asked to identify the top seven areas of greatest risk, 72 per cent of respondents said exploratory information and 60 per cent of respondents said production information. Ensuring the integrity of this vital information is of high importance and so the security of mobile devices, the data they contain, and the communication they enable should be just as crucial. Therefore, companies should consider the various ways cyber attacks penetrate their enterprises and ensure all mobile devices have strict security measures.
Sources: McKinsey & Company, The next frontier for digital technologies in oil and gas; DNV GL, Cyber security vulnerabilities for the oil and gas industry; Ponemon Institute, The State of Cybersecurity in the Oil & Gas Industry: United States
