Over the years, many industries have adopted cloud computing. It not only provides potential cost savings, but also limitless data access and exceptional computation power. Among all the countries that have adopted the cloud, the US rules the world with an estimated $206.1 billion in revenue earned through cloud computing services in 2022.
While different industries are leveraging cloud services to transform their business models, utilities have also found ways to integrate this technology for the betterment of their industry while adapting to new challenges. In this article, we will discuss cloud computing for North American Utilities, the challenges faced by them, and how they can benefit from cloud computing.
Cloud Computing & Utility Industry
With the rise in cloud adoption among different industries, the utility industry is also advancing toward cloud computing services. Many utilities have already migrated to the cloud by adopting infrastructure and software solutions. Post COVID-19, cloud computing has proved to be transformational and disruptive for utilities, offering them security, reliability, and improved scalability. Let’s talk about what role cloud computing plays for North American utilities.
What are the Factors Accelerating Cloud Adoption for North American Utilities?
While North American utilities have been reluctant to adopt cloud computing due to certain challenges, some factors are accelerating cloud adoption for them. These factors include.
Changing Customer Expectations
In this digital world, customers demand greater control over their information regardless of the industry. After all, a utility provides a service to its customers, and they are looking for more information about their utility usage and bill and how they can lessen its impact. They expect utilities to provide a higher level of security and personalization as they are enjoying from other industries, including banking, retail, etc.
Energy Transition
As the world goes through a large transition in energy, the utility industry becomes the center of attention for this seismic change. Changing energy consumption patterns and increased customer expectations make it complex to manage supply, demand, and planning of services. Complex forecasting demands a flexible and scalable computing power, accelerating the need for cloud computing for utilities.
The Rise of Intelligent Grids
Today millions of consumers are figuring out ways to consume less from the grid by adopting different ways to generate electricity on their own, including the adoption of solar panels and batteries. In some cases, many share excess electricity back to the utilities or amongst each other.
This requires utilities to manage a sophisticated grid management solution to monitor, capture, and process real-time data from millions of devices. Intelligent grids demand vast and reliable computing power, increasing the need for cloud adoption.
Digitization of the Field Workforce
Managing and Maintaining aging assets in an asset-heavy industry (the utility) takes a lot of time and money. Even today, field workers do a significant portion of this work manually, adding unnecessary time and cost to the work. AI-based predictive maintenance models can address these issues and help to avoid asset failures, enabling cloud adoption critical for facilitating these solutions.
Reliability & Resiliency
Reliability is prime for the grid. This not only refers to the reliability and resiliency of the critical grid management software but also the apps that are used to plan, model, forecast, and interact with customers. Gone are the days when you had to worry about keeping the data center up, risk overloading, or tripping a power line due to the failure of a power unit in your data center.
The need to balance the grid and business operations reliably is another factor for cloud adoption in North American utilities.
Barriers & Challenges to Cloud Adoption
While certain factors are contributing to cloud adoption in North American utilities, a few challenges hinder the process. These challenges include:
- Complex Workloads: The cloud migration progress can also act as an impediment to the cloud adoption process. One of the biggest challenges to migrating to the cloud is to move complex workloads, requiring complex transformation, strategies, and reengineering.
- Skills Gap: Complex workloads combined with a lack of perpetual talent make an even bigger barrier for cloud computing. The unavailability of the right people and key skills makes it challenging for utilities to migrate to the cloud.
- Regulatory Challenges: Utilities face a regulatory challenge to adopting cloud computing. They earn a return on their investments in several stand-alone facilities. Many regulators don’t allow this on cloud investments, making it a barrier for utilities in cloud adoption.
How Can North American Utilities Benefit From Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing can play a significant role in North American utilities, empowering them to deliver services effectively at a rapid pace. It can benefit utilities in the following ways:
Reduced Costs
Moving to cloud computing can reduce costs spent on IT operations and data centers. Owning a data center requires a lot of money, including the cost of all utilities, staff, and maintenance of on-prem data centers. Not having to invest in hardware and all these utilities significantly reduce costs.
Flexibility & Scalability
Cloud computing increases flexibility and scalability exponentially, enabling lowered investments and lowered risk due to the possibility when you may need to increase or decrease computing power or storage capacity. So, there’s no need to upgrade your entire data center just because your community’s population grew or due to server aging.
Cybersecurity
With cybersecurity on everybody’s minds today, cloud providers ensure that their services are well-secured and meet new regulations. This makes the cloud a secure way for utilities to provide network access to their employees, enabling encrypted data transfer via the cloud.
Optimized IT infrastructure
Utilities and distribution facilities are massive and complex. With the industry transforming into digital models, IT infrastructure also gets complicated. Cloud adoption helps North American utilities optimize their complex IT infrastructure by reducing dependency on on-prem IT and data centers.
Ready to Upgrade Your Utility With Awsome LLC Cloud Solutions?
Now is the time to benefit from cloud adoption as it has the potential to improve the current energy system, create innovation, and platform energy economies for utilities. You can facilitate your complex energy processes and systems by putting your trust in Awsome LLC Cloud Solutions. We provide PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS services on cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure. These can help you in planning, designing, and implementing the cloud.
Accelerate cloud adoption and empower your business with our expert assistance. Get Awsome LLC consulting today and make the most of what your cloud platform offers.
