Case study · Oil & Gas / Energy · Aberdeen, UK
An Aberdeen energy services firm had cloud infrastructure built by whoever needed it that week — no standards, no pipelines, no reproducibility. ITSECOPS provided ongoing platform engineering support: landing zones, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and the guardrails that let project teams ship safely.
The client
An energy services company in Aberdeen supporting North Sea operators, with a growing Azure estate and development teams delivering data and reporting products to clients.
The challenge
Every project provisioned its own resources by hand. Environments drifted, costs were untraceable to projects, secrets lived in scripts, and onboarding a new developer took weeks of undocumented setup.
What we did
- Designed an Azure landing zone with subscription-per-workload structure, policy guardrails and cost tagging that maps spend to projects.
- Moved infrastructure to code (Terraform + Bicep) so environments are reproducible and reviewable, not artisanal.
- Built CI/CD pipelines with environment promotion, approvals and secret management in Key Vault.
- Provided an ongoing platform engineering service: a product backlog for the platform itself, monthly platform releases and support for project teams consuming it.
- Documented golden paths so a new developer deploys to a compliant environment on day one.
Results
- Environment build time: weeks of manual setup → under a day from code.
- Cloud spend attributable to projects for the first time; orphaned resources eliminated in the first cleanup.
- Security posture improved as a side effect — policy guardrails block public storage and untagged resources by default.
FAQ
What is platform engineering support?
A managed service that treats your cloud platform as a product: landing zones, IaC, pipelines, guardrails and golden paths — continuously maintained so project teams build on rails instead of from scratch.
Do we need a full-time platform team for this?
Most mid-sized firms do not. A fractional platform engineering service covers the backlog at a fraction of the cost of hiring a dedicated team.
Does this work in regulated energy environments?
Yes — policy-as-code is precisely how you evidence controls to auditors and operators: the guardrail is the control, and its code is the documentation.