Businesses thriving in the digital era (i.e. Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.) have shown that distinction from competition is achieved through the use of an ecosystem that enables data-driven insights. This has now shifted the perspective in the oil and gas industry to view digitization as a critical component of core business.
The Oil and Gas industry is no stranger to big data, technology and digital innovation. The industry was the pioneer of the first digital age in the 1980s and 1990s. Long before phrases such as big data, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things became popular.
Lately, digital disruption is now seen as a force that is altering the corporate landscape like no other. Nowadays businesses are not just being driven to transform to meet the demands of digital. Connectivity has shown the potential to empower millions of people, while providing businesses with unparalleled opportunities for value creation and capture.
By 2025, it is anticipated that there will be more than 50 billion devices connected to the internet. This is having a disruptive impact on many industries, including the oil and gas sector, among others. Digital is a key enabler in the oil and gas industry to lessen costs, make faster and better decisions, and to increase workforce productivity.
The overarching upside is that, the use of technologies now unleashes new hydrocarbon resources and deliver operational efficiencies across the value chain by rapidly shifting from being the legacy enabler to being a game changer. On the downside, whereas digitalization could be a source of positive change, there are a number of challenges that need to be overcome to realize its full potential for both business and society.
The exponential increase in global information flows have created new risks around data privacy and security and businesses across sectors are grappling with challenges related to changing customer expectations, cultural transformation, outdated regulation, and skill shortages – to name a few.
These challenges have made the traditional business practices of scanning the environment and managing the emergent information more complicated and difficult; thereby creating higher levels of uncertainty/operational unpredictability. Aside the positives, digital also connects us all in a web and renders the whole web only as strong as its weakest point – a significant weakness that allows attackers of various sorts to use them for any number of goals.
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This growing complexity even makes businesses more vulnerable as hackers are honing their skills, declaring the cyberspace a battlefield where they choose the time and place of attack as well as the target – hence the attackers have the advantage of surprise. Several of the world’s major oil and gas producers have fallen victim to cyberattacks since 2008. Some damage was done in each of these cases, but the costs of future breaches will be much higher.
Successful cyberattacks threaten the competitiveness of the global oil and gas industry, one of the most technically advanced and economically important sectors. Hardly a day goes by without a breach or cyber incident being reported. Understanding what is coming towards the industry will help it to better prepare.
In 2020 more than ever, cyberattacks are no longer a question of if, but of how and when our common enemy (hacktivist) will strike. This is a concern that applies to the oil and gas industry. Agreed, digital transformation plays an instrumental role in enabling innovation and prosperity globally but a major obstacle to society’s continued path to development are the ever-increasing cyberattacks carried out by malicious actors taking advantage of a borderless playing field, and the challenges to digital trust that this represents.
This paper believes that enhancing collaboration between public- and private-sector partners, civil society and academia is of paramount importance to counterbalance the trend.
In Nigeria, it is the collective responsibility of the government and the oil and gas industry players to take full ownership of the cyber challenge and to work out a remedy together. Which is why this paper’s aim is on the readiness approach to offer an understanding of the risk picture, find existing gaps and propose actions to strengthen cyber security.
Derefaka is the Technical Adviser (TA) – Gas Business & Policy Implementation, to the Honorable Minister of State, Petroleum Resources and Program Manager, Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialization Programme (NGFCP).
