From 100-Year-Old Energy Company to Cloud-First Organization
OXY, a century-old energy company operating across oil and gas, chemicals, and low carbon ventures, embarked on a dramatic infrastructure transformation journey starting from ground zero in 2021. The company faced a critical challenge: their legacy on-premises infrastructure required 74 days and multiple siloed teams to provision a single EC2 instance across development, test, and production environments. This manual, ticket-driven process involved security, networking, compute, and storage teams working in isolation, creating massive bottlenecks that prevented the organization from responding to business needs. The pandemic supply chain crisis of 2018-2019, combined with emerging AI opportunities, forced leadership to reconsider their infrastructure strategy and commit to cloud migration with automation at its core.
The Business Impact Assessment That Changed Everything
Working with HashiCorp's field team, OXY conducted a comprehensive business impact assessment that mapped every step of their provisioning process, identifying which teams were involved, how long each stage took, and where bottlenecks existed. This white-glove assessment revealed the shocking reality: what should take minutes was consuming months of organizational time and resources. The visual representation of this 74-day process became the most powerful selling tool for executive buy-in, eliminating the need for lengthy justification presentations. By applying theory of constraints thinking, the team identified the longest poles in the tent and prioritized automation efforts on the stages that would deliver the most immediate time-to-value improvements, focusing first on low-hanging fruit that could demonstrate quick wins to skeptical stakeholders.
Building the Foundation: Platform Teams and Operating Models
OXY's transformation strategy centered on three foundational elements: establishing a platform engineering team, defining a cloud operating model, and creating reusable blueprints (golden patterns). The platform engineering team combined operators with developers to bridge the skills gap, as traditional infrastructure teams lacked familiarity with Git, Azure DevOps pipelines, YAML, and Terraform. The cloud operating model addressed the shared responsibility challenge by clearly defining ownership—who is accountable for IAM policies, network configurations, security controls, and other cloud constructs. This eliminated the dangerous "everybody owns security" mindset that actually means nobody does. By implementing HashiCorp Vault for just-in-time password rotation and secrets management, the team gained critical buy-in from security stakeholders who had previously been the biggest blockers to cloud adoption.
Phased Approach Delivers Measurable Results
Rather than attempting a complete transformation overnight, OXY adopted a phased approach with clear intermediate goals. Phase one focused on automating AWS account creation as an entry point, reducing provisioning time from 74 days to 30-plus days using Terraform Cloud, Packer for image building, and Vault for security. Phase two targets a four-day provisioning cycle—a 95% reduction from the original baseline. The team celebrates wins monthly with leadership and the broader organization, providing visibility into progress while maintaining momentum. By building blueprints for high-impact application teams first and gathering continuous feedback, the platform team shifted from reactive ticket processing to proactive service delivery. This customer-centric approach, treating internal developers as customers deserving of joy and ease of use, has been critical to driving adoption and cultural transformation across the organization.
