As the energy industry transitions to more sustainable sources and decentralized generation, existing IT systems must be modernized to handle increased data demands.
With more connected assets on the grid, such as photovoltaic panels and storage batteries, decentralized distribution and less predictable output from renewable sources, there will be a huge increase in the volume, velocity and variety of data.
To balance the grid and maintain profitability, organizations must be able to gather, process and use this data to inform all kinds of decisions — from supply and demand forecasting to near real-time energy trading. With technical debt and complex intricacies built up over decades, existing solutions are already struggling to keep up and are difficult to change. Finding suitable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) replacements or building new solutions from scratch is also far from simple. COTS solutions are likely to struggle to push information to the right place — up or down the decision-making chain as needed — to get timely insights to the right people. Organizations must find new ways to manage and use rapidly growing volumes of data at scale efficiently and effectively.
In many industries, the fastest and simplest route to modernization would be migrating to the public cloud, which offers business agility, elastic scalability and instant access to the latest capabilities. But energy firms are responsible for critical national infrastructure; the wrong decisions could cause damage to assets, individuals and society. That brings significant demands for security, safety, reliability and data sovereignty, making the public cloud insufficient for many of the sector's use cases.
So, how can energy firms modernize their IT systems to support the energy transition — without compromising their ability to (literally) keep the lights on?
Apply modern engineering approaches to deliver cloud-like capabilities on-premises
By applying modern engineering principles and practices in on-premises data centers, energy firms can break down monolithic systems, overcome legacy complexity and deliver new IT capabilities at speed and scale:
Follow cloud-native architecture practices
The resilience, scalability and programmatic control interfaces that characterize public cloud environments are less about the infrastructure that applications are hosted on and more about the platform's architecture. By following cloud-native architecture practices, such as microservices and infrastructure as code, organizations can more easily build and deploy secure, reliable technology capabilities at scale.
In a recent webinar, Andreas Reisenauer, Head of IT Infrastructure at the transmission system operator Elia Group, showed how his organization is putting this into practice. Andreas explained that, by building cloud capabilities into on-premises infrastructures, organizations retain control over their infrastructure, data and security while gaining the flexibility to change as their needs evolve. This is vital for organizations responsible for critical national infrastructure. By maintaining full ownership of their digital infrastructure, operators can ensure they have capabilities and control to fulfill their responsibility to keep the lights on. To dive into the details of how Andreas and his team are modernizing IT infrastructure at Elia Group, you can watch the webinar on demand.
Implement domain-driven design
Domain-driven design (DDD), which focuses software development around a thorough and evolving model of a particular business domain and its value-generating processes, is a vital part of the modern developer's toolkit. Successful DDD starts by focusing on the desired outcome and the business capabilities that will deliver it, thinking about the tech capabilities required, and then considering how these capabilities can serve other parts of the organization in a composable, reusable way. These composable capabilities are much easier to evolve to meet changing needs compared to environments with tightly bound, low-level integration between systems.
Create a data mesh
Since Thoughtworks introduced the Data Mesh concept five years ago, adoption has continued to grow, with more organizations giving domain teams control over — and responsibility for — their data and data products. Creating a data mesh makes it far easier for teams to discover, access and reuse data products created by other domains.
Modernize in the right direction
Finally, it's important to keep in mind the 'direction of modernization.' To be effective, IT modernization must start with data at a socio-technical level before modernizing the applications and infrastructure as a symbiotic pair.
More than just a tech challenge
Creating a 'cloud-native data center' isn't just a technical challenge. Energy firms need to bring in foundational data center expertise, but find the most talented people often want to work for hyperscalers and other tech innovators.
One way organizations can attract and retain the right data center talent is by rethinking how they serve capabilities to engineering teams. It's essential to think of engineers as customers and identify ways to improve their experience while not sacrificing business outcomes. By providing the best tools and implementing modern engineering practices, energy firms can reduce friction and allow talented people to do their best work.
Expert support for your modernization program
With growing pressure to accelerate the energy transition, IT modernization can't wait any longer. It's vital for energy firms to deliver new business and technology capabilities quickly without compromising grid operations. To achieve this, energy firms can adopt and adapt the capabilities of cloud hyperscalers to offer new and continuously evolving capabilities as a fully managed service, providing operational agility while retaining control over the physical grid and its digital counterpart.
At Thoughtworks, we have deep experience in helping organizations across numerous sectors — including energy — accelerate modernization initiatives. Our experts can fill internal skills gaps in the short term and provide the training and knowledge transfer to upskill in-house teams for future success.