Case Study
A new IT ecosystem for an offshore drilling enterprise
Background
Following a strategic corporate carve-out from its parent organisation, a newly formed offshore drilling enterprise engaged our services to architect and deploy a fully independent, enterprise-grade global IT ecosystem. The mandate required a greenfield infrastructure capable of seamlessly supporting distributed corporate operations, regional field offices, and a fleet of high- consequence offshore jack-up drilling rigs.
Our approach
The primary objective was to engineer and execute a comprehensive technology cutover without incurring operational downtime or disrupting critical day-to-day drilling activities.
Headquartered in Dubai, the organisation’s footprint spanned eight countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, servicing a workforce of 5,000 personnel. Operating jack-up rigs in remote, shallow-water offshore environments presented significant engineering challenges, requiring highly resilient, secure infrastructure and robust telecommunications to guarantee continuous operational uptime.
To achieve rapid deployment and eliminate the capital expenditure of a massive on-premises footprint, we designed and deployed a pioneering, cloud-native platform built on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. This architecture established a highly secure, scalable foundation for enterprise identity, collaboration, and core business services to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory.
Technology in scope
- Cloud and identity infrastructure: High-availability architecture utilizing Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and enterprise Active Directory.
- Virtualisation and compute: Robust VMware virtualization environments to optimise resource utilisation.
- Remote connectivity and edge networks: Deployment of high-resilience VSAT satellite communications tailored for remote maritime assets.
- Network optimisation: Integration of Riverbed WAN optimization appliances to maximize throughput and counteract latency over satellite links.
- Unified communications: Cisco CME telephony platforms deployed across regional and offshore endpoints.
Results
A fully autonomous, unified global IT infrastructure as delivered that seamlessly interconnected all corporate offices, regional logistics hubs and offshore drilling assets.
Following the successful migration, our mandate transitioned into a managed operations and continuous improvement role. Key lifecycle achievements during this phase included:
- Fleet Expansion: End-to-end IT, networking, and systems provisioning for two new-build drilling rigs commissioned in Thailand.
- Lifecycle Management: Execution of a zero-downtime global Active Directory domain controller upgrade from Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2012 R2.
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