When leadership at one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas companies asked how a single engineer had documented 30 remote oil field sites for a divestment handoff in 30 minutes — a process that used to take two weeks — the answer was straightforward: NetBrain. But that moment was just one data point in a much bigger story.
For the company’s unconventional energy division, the headline achievement is this: zero change-related network outages over a sustained twelve-month period — across a network of 800+ sites, most of them unmanned and scattered across remote locations. No incidents triggered by a failed change. No rollbacks that became outages. No post-change surprises.
That outcome didn't happen by accident. It was built deliberately — through rigorous change validation, proactive automation, and a platform that became the backbone of how the team operates.
The Challenge: Rapid Growth, High Stakes, Small Team
When the Permian Basin experienced its resurgence, the network team found itself deploying one to two new sites per week with same-day notice. Engineers received calls that a router had been pulled off a shelf and needed to go live by end of day. Documentation lagged. Some sites had no address — just GPS coordinates and names like "XYZ Tank Battery." The technology environment spanned Juniper, Palo Alto, Versa, Cisco, Azure, AWS, VMware, and Nutanix, with global teams across multiple continents and an MSP handling tier-one through tier-three support.
Making changes in this environment carried real risk. Without confident pre-change validation or automated post-change verification, any network change was a potential outage in waiting. In an environment where sites are remote and unmanned, a failed change doesn't just affect productivity — it can halt the operational technology systems that support oil field operations.
How They Got to Zero: The Change Protection Model
The zero-outage result came from building a systematic, repeatable three-stage approach to change management — one that eliminated the guesswork at every stage of a change lifecycle.
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From Tool to Team Habit
That confidence expanded well beyond the division. The company’s flagship refinery — one of the largest in the world — adopted NetBrain after seeing the results. The team then hosted a two-day NetBrain training event for 25 attendees from five companies. The people who built the most capability chose to share it.
Twelve months. Hundreds of changes. Zero outages.
That's not a goal. That's proof!