On December 5, Stewart Fry, Vice President of Enterprise Information Technology & Services for BP, took the stage at Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to talk about two seemingly contradictory matters: how migrating the fossil fuel company's vast digital enterprise into the cloud was helping to accelerate oil production, and how the same move would help fight climate change.

As Fry explained it, BP's decision to become a "cloud first" company in 2016 was already reaping rewards. Moving their databases from local servers to AWS data centers was causing them to run over 30 percent faster on average. By harnessing new "refinery optimization" tools, calculations that once took BP seven hours could now be completed in under four minutes. "We're seeing really good benefits," Fry said. "The most notable being around cost agility, reduced capital, and improved performance."