Russian Miner Partners with Cloud Services Provider to Pump up Software Development

Russian miner Nornickel, which is switching its IT infrastructure to homebred solutions after some foreign software providers withdrew from Russia, started using services of the Yandex Cloud data platform to facilitate development of mining, geological modeling and infrastructure planning software, the company said.

Previously, the company used its own servers for these tasks, but the partnership already helped to accelerate processes related to machine learning technologies by almost 18%.

“Before starting cooperation with Yandex Cloud, we conducted a number of checks and made sure of the reliability, stable operation and security of services. Now, even on small projects, we see how product development is accelerating,” Nornickel’s IT strategy and business applications director Alexey Manikhin says.

Nornickel claims that switching to cloud services helped speed up a number of processes. For example, choosing capacity options and setting up servers for a project that previously took up to 10 days can now be done in one day. It took about a month to create a software machine learning model and test it in the company’s own infrastructure. Yandex Cloud Services helped cut this timeframe to 15-16 days.

“The need to use these services is dictated by the large volumes of data that enterprises generate and process. These include industrial robots, various humidity and temperature sensors, and predictive analytics systems. In Russia, the cloud transformation in metallurgy is just beginning,” a Yandex Cloud spokesperson said.

Nornickel began to use Yandex Cloud products not only for own tasks, but also for the development of software products within the Industrial Competence Center (ICC) Metallurgy, which was set up by the Russian government last year along with other similar ICC for other sectors to help them deal with the consequences of sanctions and exit of many Western firms.

Earlier this summer, Nornickel urged fellow Russian metal producers to synchronize transition to friendly solutions at critical IT infrastructure within the framework of this ICC.

The company is responsible for three projects within ICC Metallurgy: Mining and Geological Information System, Automatic Process Control System for Mining Planning, and Underground Mining Dispatching.