From Rigs to AI: How Aker BP Runs on Nasuni

About Aker BP

Aker BP is one of Europe’s largest independent listed oil and gas companies, focused on exploration, development, and production on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The company operates six major field centers, holds a significant stake in the Johan Sverdrup field, and produces more than 450,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from its headquarters in Fornebu, outside Oslo.

Aker BP has consistently been at the forefront of digital transformation in the energy sector. Through its Eureka digitalization program and early investment in the Cognite Data Fusion platform, the company pioneered data-driven approaches to upstream operations long before they became industry standard. That same appetite for innovation drives how Aker BP approaches infrastructure: the company expects its technology partners to move as fast as it does.

The challenge

Before Nasuni, Aker BP’s storage infrastructure relied on traditional on-premises solutions backed by tape drives. The setup was functional but fragile. When something went wrong, restoring data from tape could take days or weeks, and a major incident risked shutting down operations for even longer. Rebuilding the storage structure itself would have been an equally slow and expensive process. For a company managing critical production data across multiple offshore platforms, that level of risk was unsustainable.

Aker BP was simultaneously accelerating its cloud strategy, investing heavily in Azure-based infrastructure across the business. The legacy storage environment didn’t fit that direction. The company needed a platform that could integrate natively with the cloud, eliminate duplicate storage environments, and deliver the resilience that offshore operations demand. When Aker BP evaluated its options alongside vendors like NetApp and Pure Storage, it was Microsoft who recommended Nasuni as the right fit for the company’s cloud-first ambitions.

What Nasuni delivered

Operational Resilience: From Weeks to Minutes

The most transformative impact was on data recovery and uptime. Restoring a deleted folder or rolling back to an earlier version previously took days or weeks; with Nasuni, it takes minutes. Since deployment, the platform has delivered near-continuous uptime, a stark contrast to the incidents that plagued the legacy environment. Users across both onshore and offshore environments now have consistent, reliable access to the same datasets regardless of location, including Aker BP’s Exploration group, which works across multiple VDI environments and can now access data seamlessly from any workspace.

Data Team Autonomy and Governance

Nasuni put control directly in the hands of Aker BP’s data management team. Data managers can now perform restores themselves without escalating to IT, respond to user requests in real time, and take ownership of their storage environment. That autonomy has translated into tangible results: data growth across the platform has remained notably flat in recent months, a sign that the team is actively curating and cleaning data rather than simply accumulating it. For an organization generating massive volumes of exploration and production data, this kind of disciplined data hygiene is a real value-add for everyone involved.

Proactive Threat Detection

Nasuni’s ransomware detection has already proven its value at Aker BP. On two occasions, the system flagged unusual file activity matching ransomware behavior patterns. Both turned out to be legitimate but atypical user activity, and the system correctly intervened by restricting access and alerting IT before any damage could occur. For Aker BP, the value is knowing that Nasuni is actively protecting the environment, not just warning but taking action, providing a security layer that the previous infrastructure never offered.

The solution has been incredibly stable; It’s never down, and it just works. I can’t imagine how we could have delivered what we’ve delivered today without Nasuni. It would have been very costly and a very slow process to get where we are now.

Roy Ingebrigtsen, Infrastructure Service Manager, Aker BP

Results At-A-Glance

The following metrics illustrate the impact of Aker BP’s Nasuni deployment:

• Data restores reduced from weeks to minutes with a 99% reduction in restore times
• Near-continuous uptime since deployment, replacing a failure-prone legacy environment; Zero downtime since installing Nasuni from ransomware incidents
• 20% cost savings compared to previous on-premises storage and tape backup infrastructure
• Data management team empowered to self-serve restores and govern storage independently
• No duplicated data between on-premises and Azure environments

AI, Scale, and the Next Chapter

True to its reputation as an industry innovator, Aker BP has established a centralized AI Hub to coordinate artificial intelligence initiatives across the business, and Nasuni is positioned to play a foundational role. The company has standardized on Microsoft Copilot and is working to connect Nasuni-backed unstructured data into the AI Hub using AI Activate, where it can be surfaced to agents and workflows across the organization. The goal is to provide a governed, centralized data service rather than allowing individual teams to run queries directly against file systems, an approach that reduces risk, prevents agent sprawl, and ensures consistency as AI adoption scales.

Aker BP is also currently evaluating Nasuni’s ADME connector as a critical bridge between file-based data and energy-industry platforms. Many of Aker BP’s specialized applications are not yet cloud-native, meaning data often needs to exist in multiple locations. The ADME integration offers a path to connect Nasuni directly to those environments, reducing duplication and simplifying data flows between upstream applications and central storage.

Further out, Aker BP sees strong potential in Nasuni’s Resilio product for ship-to-shore data synchronization. Offshore rigs and vessels connected via Starlink face inherent challenges including limited bandwidth and intermittent coverage. A lightweight edge solution that reliably synchronizes data between offshore installations and onshore infrastructure would close a longstanding operational gap and extend Aker BP’s cloud-first strategy to the most remote corners of the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

We didn’t fully know how our cloud vision would evolve when we chose Nasuni, but we could see the landscape was shifting. Looking back, I don’t think we could have gotten to where we are today without it. It’s been the foundation for everything we’ve built since.

Roy Ingebrigtsen, Infrastructure Service Manager, Aker BP

The Nasuni difference

Aker BP’s partnership with Nasuni shows what happens when a company known for pushing the boundaries of digital innovation in energy pairs with infrastructure that can keep pace. By replacing legacy storage with a cloud-native platform that delivers near-instant recovery, always-on reliability, and proactive security, Aker BP has solved the data challenges of today while building the foundation for AI-driven exploration tomorrow. For energy companies looking to modernize without compromising the resilience their operations demand, Aker BP’s experience makes a compelling case.

“In our industry, the ability to access, trust, and act on data is what separates the leaders from the rest. Nasuni gave us a modern data foundation that aligned with our cloud strategy from day one, and as we move into more advanced workflows, that foundation is proving even more valuable than we originally anticipated. It’s exactly the kind of partnership we look for: technology that grows with our ambition.”
Thomas Hoff-Hansen, CIO, Aker BP