The increasing demand for electrification, grid modernization, and distributed energy is pushing traditional operational technology (OT) environments to their limits. At the same time, utilities and energy providers must navigate a complex regulatory landscape, including data sovereignty requirements in Europe and cybersecurity mandates like North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The adoption of cloud technology is accelerating, but many OT systems, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), and Outage Management Systems (OMS), require hybrid architectures to ensure operational continuity, compliance, and secure integration with real-time grid control.

The challenge is to unlock the full potential of the cloud while ensuring mission-critical operations remain secure, resilient, and interoperable with legacy infrastructure. Energy providers must find a way to balance the benefits of cloud technology with the need to maintain control and security over their OT systems.

Microsoft for Energy and Resources

Drive innovation to achieve net zero and deliver safe, reliable, equitable energy for a sustainable future.

Adaptive Cloud: The Bridge between IT, OT, and AI-Powered Intelligence

The Microsoft adaptive cloud approach provides a seamless, scalable, and secure framework for unifying on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. This approach integrates IT and OT seamlessly, bringing together on-premises control systems and edge intelligence with cloud-scale analytics. Instead of forcing a binary choice between on-premises versus cloud, adaptive cloud supports energy providers to integrate on-premises systems with cloud-driven intelligence while meeting global compliance and sovereignty requirements.

• Integrate on-premises systems with cloud-driven intelligence while meeting global compliance and sovereignty requirements.
• Utilize complex AI algorithms and real-time data streaming to unlock operational efficiencies, increase resilience, and enhance reliability.
• Strengthen cybersecurity with built-in Zero Trust protections and industry-aligned security frameworks.
• Support edge computing for localized grid control while harnessing the cloud’s computational power.

At Microsoft, we’re working with energy leaders around the world to implement this adaptive cloud approach, which unites and integrates siloed teams, distributed sites, and operational systems into a unified model for operations, security, applications, and data. With a foundation built on Microsoft Azure and spanning more than 60 public cloud regions, our approach supports energy providers to utilize cloud-native and AI capabilities across the enterprise while bringing together IT and OT systems to accelerate energy production and help teams manage increasingly complex environments more efficiently.

Meeting Growing Demand while Driving Critical Efficiencies

As population growth and rapidly changing markets continue driving demand for energy, industry leaders are faced with immense pressure to provide secure, equitable, and sustainable energy while optimizing every aspect of business for continued growth. The Microsoft adaptive cloud environment sets the stage for critical improvements that help energy companies keep up with demand without overextending their resources. These improvements include:

• Secure integration of cloud AI with critical OT systems. Many grid control systems must interact with real-time operational data while ensuring security and compliance.
• Enhanced security. The increasing sophistication of cyber threats makes security a non-negotiable priority.
• Faster data analytics. Energy operators require high-speed decision-making, but traditional OT systems often rely on static models that struggle to adapt to real-time fluctuations.
• Compliance with global regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. Energy companies navigate a complex web of regional regulations.

• Edge computing for low-latency control and decision-making. Certain grid operations require millisecond response times, making local processing at the substation or field level critical.
• Increased scalability and flexibility. An adaptive cloud also supports energy providers to remain agile with changing demands and adopt new technologies that can easily integrate with current infrastructure investments.

Global Energy Leaders Unlock New Value with Azure

Microsoft collaborates with energy customers to unearth insights that help them make better, faster decisions and optimize efficiencies across the enterprise. For many, that starts with introducing cloud solutions that make it easier to collect and organize data. But data regulations, legacy on-premises systems, and a growing number of applications to manage are just a few challenges that pop up along the way.

Uniper: Standardizing IT and OT with a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Uniper, the world’s largest power generation company, wanted to introduce cloud solutions but faced strict regulations around where certain applications could operate depending on the type of data involved. Their solution:

• Microsoft Azure Arc and Microsoft Azure Monitor created a single dashboard for managing applications across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Microsoft Azure Stack HCI allowed hybrid use of cloud services while ensuring compliance with European data regulations.

With this adaptive cloud strategy, Uniper can now manage IT and OT environments in a standardized way, launch new services faster, and optimize performance without disrupting critical infrastructure.

Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA): AI-Powered Edge Intelligence for Industrial Operations

EGA is another energy leader that turned to Azure to pave a path for sustainable, scalable infrastructure. EGA’s on-premises environment couldn’t deliver the level of flexibility needed to manage increasingly complex and data-intensive operations with scalable computing infrastructure.

Using an adaptive cloud approach went a long way in helping EGA accelerate industrial AI use cases and improve production processes. The company experienced 10 to 13 times faster AI response time, lower latency, and 86% cost savings associated with AI image and video use cases.

An Adaptive Cloud Approach to Power a Sustainable Energy Future

As enterprises from across all industries aim to reduce their carbon footprint through more efficient, sustainable practices, there’s little doubt that all eyes are on the energy industry to lead the way. Microsoft is


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