BP adopts hybrid cloud and moves applications and datacenter operations to Azure

Recognizing the benefits of a cloud infrastructure

BP has operations in 73 countries and a network of mega datacenters across the world. That arrangement served the company well for years, but the emergence of global cloud providers gave BP reason to rethink its IT strategy.

“We recognized that we could never achieve the sort of scale, flexibility, innovation, stability, and geographic scope that we saw emerging with public cloud platforms,” says Tom Inglis, Director of Developer Platforms at BP. “That led us to announce a cloud-first strategy and make plans to exit the datacenter management business and move our infrastructure to the cloud.”

BP chose to move to Microsoft Azure. “We’ve always been a big Microsoft customer, and we see that relationship as key, so Azure just made sense,” says John Maio, Microsoft Platform Chief Architect at BP. “We don’t want to spend a lot of money on operations—we want to spend it on actually developing applications and delivering business value. Azure is a superb environment for that.”

BP had a large and diverse Microsoft SharePoint Server deployment that included collaboration sites and an application development platform, and the company decided to make SharePoint its first cloud workload. This early deployment gave BP important insight into the ramifications of a cloud migration.

“When we first lifted and shifted our SharePoint resources to Azure, we saw the cloud as more of a hosting solution, and we just transferred our on-premises behaviors to the cloud,” says John Foster, Head of Microsoft Platforms at BP. “But we quickly realized that getting full value out of the cloud requires a different mindset. We had to learn to take a cloud-native approach, so our mantra became ‘Think cloudy.’”

With on-premises datacenters, companies typically opt for the biggest, most powerful server available, because it’s not always possible to anticipate future computing needs and budgets. In the “cloudy” world, though, things are much easier. “In the past, we might have needed a million dollars of capital to build a massive infrastructure before a project even started,” says Foster. “With Azure, we can spin up a powerful virtual machine on demand and run applications for tens of dollars a day with no upfront procurement. Being able to do cutting-edge work quickly and without spending a lot of time on capital planning or bureaucracy has been really empowering.”

Establishing a hybrid estate across on-premises and cloud resources

Although BP has embraced a cloud-first strategy, some resources will need to stay on-premises for the foreseeable future due to strict data protection or data sovereignty laws in some countries and regions. Some BP locations that the company wants to move to the cloud present other challenges requiring a hybrid approach, and BP is solving those with tools like Azure Stack. “We have some very remote regions that don’t have their own datacenters, but we can provide cloud functionality there by putting in Azure Stack and connecting back to BP to give those employees easy access to everything they need, including corporate apps,” says Foster.

To build a fast and highly available hybrid network, BP is using Azure networking services, including multiple instances of Azure ExpressRoute to connect on-premises datacenters to Azure, using a hub-and-spoke architecture. “We’ve found that Azure has strong support for a hybrid cloud, and ExpressRoute is one of the most important features,” says Maio. “With it, we can easily communicate between on-premises resources and the cloud and vice versa. That connectivity is a fundamental part of our hybrid architecture.”

BP uses internet service provider capabilities within regional offices with carrier interconnects to onboard those offices to Azure at a quicker pace, and the company wants to tie that in to Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN for software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) capabilities. Unlike the open internet, this offers the advantages of optimized routing and minimal latency using connections that Microsoft has set up.

BP implemented a unified identity and access management solution using on-premises Active Directory and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for the cloud. “To make the hybrid arrangement work well, you’ve got to understand the importance of single sign-on,” says Inglis. “With Azure AD, we can connect our cloud and on-premises environments within an integrated identity layer, which helps us bridge the gap between the two in a more seamless way.”

BP is currently using Azure Security Center to manage its Azure resources, and the company is investigating using the product for its on-premises environment as well. “It’s a fundamental change for us to manage a hybrid architecture,” says Denis Ontiveros, Security Platforms Director at BP. “We want to be more agile, and one way to get there is to start using cloud services to manage our on-premises resources.”

The company has started a pilot deployment of Azure Front Door Service, which simplifies fast delivery of globally distributed applications through a single scalable and highly secure entry point, with HTTP load balancing and path-based routing. “For people in remote locations, we use Azure Front Door Service to get them onto the Microsoft backbone as quickly as possible,” says Foster. “We then use the high-speed Microsoft network to connect them straight to the Azure region where we run our services.”

Delivering great results with great teamwork

BP has successfully moved numerous applications to Azure and has its robust hybrid architecture in place where necessary. Plans to decommission on-premises datacenters are proceeding smoothly as well—the company is almost completely out of one of its mega datacenters located in the United States. 

“We’re very pleased with our progress, and we’ve been extremely happy with the support we’ve received from Microsoft at every step in the process,” says Foster. “They always bring their best and brightest people, and they deliver. We’ve really worked together as a team, and that’s a big reason things have gone so well so far.”

For more about how BP is embracing digital transformation and the cloud, read this story.

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