How GE Oil & Gas Cut IT Costs by 52%

The power of the cloud at work

In the early 2010s, GE Oil & Gas, a multinational conglomerate General Electric division, was facing a pressing issue.

The company was spending a significant amount of its budget on maintaining its IT infrastructure, and the spending was trending upwards. Their current setup needed to be more scalable and adaptable to the fast-paced energy industry’s needs.

It was clear that something had to change.

After careful deliberation, the GE Oil & Gas team decided in 2014 to embark on a massive cloud migration project. They partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of its robust capabilities and reputation in the industry.

The project was ambitious: move over 500 applications to the AWS cloud over the next three years. The company’s leadership knew the process would be challenging, but they believed in the potential long-term benefits.

“GE is turning into the first digital industrial organization in the world,” Ben Wilson, chief IT officer at the time for GE Oil & Gas said. “We have to tag, measure, monitor, and automate every application and start to create patterns that make those reusable. Without that, we would never be successful.”