Oil and Gas Sector: A Systematic Literature Review of Digitalization, Cybersecurity, and Human Factors in the Post COVID World

The human factor, digitization, and cybersecurity are interconnected to each other. Recently, cyber threats are becoming more complex and real due to the enormous growth and advancement in sophisticated technology. Consequently, cyber threat actors have gained access to the nation-states’ critical infrastructure, particularly the oil and gas sector. This requires oil and gas producers to take concrete measures to safeguard themselves against these stealth enemies. In the light of rapidly changing digital and cybersecurity landscape, a deeper understanding of the interaction between digitization, cybersecurity and human component is needed. Oil and gas practitioners and academics have been working collaboratively and independently for decades to digitize the industry to make it more cost-efficient and resilient. However, different aspects of digitization, for example cybersecurity and human aspect were not able to keep up with the pace of digitization. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to chronologically track the development of the smart factories, importance of human factor and cyber security practices employing various digitization strategies and identify the gaps in digitization, human factor and cybersecurity and their interrelationship. This is done by adopting a systematic and methodical approach to undertake a systematic literature review on digitization of petroleum industry. 61 papers were shortlisted after a careful and rigorous research in four major databases, that is, SCOPUS, AAPG ProQuest and Web of Science. This paper discusses the publication patterns, origin and purpose of digitization models, and its adoption in the petroleum sector domain, while recognizing the significance of human factor and cybersecurity. In the past, there was a trend of taking actions after the cyber-attack has occurred, human impact was relatively ignored, and the pace of digitization has been more than the advances in cybersecurity management. This knowledge gap poses a major challenge in the oil and gas sector, where billions of dollars are at stake. With the passage of time, as digitization programs have evolved, cyber security and employee training and awareness have become integral components, and cybersecurity has been incorporated as an essential component of digitization frameworks in the proposed models. However, these models need to be validated and updated further and to be explored at the project level.