In the Clouds: A Seismic Conversation at 35,000 Feet

On my flight to the AWS Energy Symposium from St. Louis to Houston, I cracked open my laptop to finalize some notes. It was a new MacBook Air, fast and beautiful, but I hadn’t yet picked up a privacy screen. Within minutes, I noticed the passenger next to me was “screen creeping.” A few more minutes in, they weren’t just glancing. They were reading.

Eventually, they leaned over and said, “So… you’re in oil and gas IT?” I nodded, half-annoyed, half-amused. What followed was an unexpected conversation about seismic storage, cloud architecture, and how their cousin works with servers in a trailer in Midland. We talked about global collaboration, edge caching, and why version control is a secret villain in most data workflows.

As the plane landed, I realized how naturally the value of Nasuni and AWS resonates, even at 35,000 feet with a curious stranger. And yes, I immediately ordered a privacy screen from Amazon to be delivered to my hotel, just to avoid giving an encore performance on the flight home.

But here’s the kicker. That curious stranger? Turns out they were the chief geoscientist at a global oil and gas company. What started as an awkward screen-peek turned into an in-depth discussion and, eventually, a new opportunity we’re now actively exploring together. I guess you could say edge caching isn’t the only thing that works in real time.

Seismic Data vs. Antiquated Storage

Seismic data isn’t just another technical challenge. It is sprawling, collaborative, and constantly evolving. It is also one of the most mission-critical datasets in energy today. The files are enormous, the teams are global, and deadlines aren’t negotiable. Yet for years, many organizations have patched together storage strategies that simply cannot keep up. There are racks of aging hardware, expensive tape archives, disconnected regions, and a mess of manual workarounds.

Enter Nasuni and AWS.

What we’re delivering isn’t just cloud scale: it’s an architecture tailored for high-volume, globally distributed seismic workloads. Nasuni caches active seismic data at the edge, where geoscientists and subsurface teams need it most. Amazon S3 stores the seismic data as the “gold copy,” offering essentially limitless capacity without the operational drag. Whether teams are working in Petrel, Kingdom, or other industry applications, the key is having a single global namespace. That unified environment, paired with edge caching, means users across Houston, Aberdeen, and Perth can access and collaborate on the same files quickly and reliably, without duplicating or versioning chaos.

And we’re not just talking about convenience. This directly impacts business outcomes. We’re seeing customers accelerate project timelines, reduce infrastructure costs, and eliminate redundant data silos. One exploration team cut its turnaround time by over 50 percent. Another eliminated an entire tier of legacy infrastructure in favor of a single, cloud-native workflow that simply works.

Closing the Gap

As I walked through the show floor at the AWS Energy Symposium in Houston, a sense of shared purpose was everywhere. The conversations were deep, technical, and practical. People weren’t asking if the cloud was ready for seismic data. They were asking how fast they could move. The answer, as it turns out, is pretty fast.

For me, that is the most energizing part. We’re no longer in a phase of convincing people the cloud can handle these workloads. We’re in the phase of accelerating results. Whether it’s through a conversation on a plane or a demo at a conference booth, the gap between what customers need and what’s possible is closing fast.

So, if you’re dealing with seismic storage pain, whether it’s version chaos, data duplication, ballooning infrastructure, or just the headache of remote collaboration, it might be time for a conversation. Just maybe not one over my shoulder on the next flight.