Like many companies, mining giant Gold Fields has been pursuing a global initiative to move its on-premises IT workloads into the cloud.
The project, which has been running since 2022, has allowed Gold Fields to modernise its technology stack and use analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve operational efficiencies and enhance workplace safety.
The company also makes extensive use of predictive models to determine when machinery and other equipment will need maintenance. Computer vision technology has become an important tool in Gold Field’s health and safety procedures.
In a keynote address at the Johannesburg leg of Amazon Web Services’s AWS Summit 2024 last Thursday, Strini Mudaly, vice president and group head of ICT at Gold Fields, provided insight into the challenges the company faced in its migration from on-premises IT to the cloud.
“Our journey into the future and into the cloud pushed the boundaries of what is possible in our industry,” said Mudaly. “AI introduced opportunities to improve in all of our mission’s components, but moving our data to the cloud was the first step we needed to take – we turned to AWS as our technology partner.”
Gold Fields operates in some of the harshest environments on Earth. The company has mining operations as deep as 4km underground (South Deep mine in Westonaria is an example) where temperatures can average as much as 66°C. At the opposite end of the scale, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Gold Fields operates at altitudes of 5 000m above sea level and temperatures can drop to as low as -20°C.
Remote sites
Operational sites are often remote, meaning connectivity, while essential, is not always a given. According to Mudaly, Amazon’s foray into low-Earth orbit solutions with Project Kuiper was influential in Gold Fields’ decision to choose AWS as its cloud partner, despite the company not making use of Kuiper yet (the service is yet to be launched commercially).
“There are a number of low-Earth orbit satellite solutions already available, but Kuiper is working to bring an enterprise-grade solution to market, which is what we need. Integration with AWS is also important to us,” said Mudaly.
One of the first challenges Mudaly had to face in initiating the multinational’s journey into the cloud was at leadership level, beginning with himself. In initial meetings with his IT teams, he realised he needed to reskill himself to better lead the team.
He identified a skills gap at leadership level that threatened the success of the project. But reskilling programmes had to filter down the ranks, too. This included changing the composition of the team to include business skills to complement the IT talent. Then, said Mudaly, he brought in experts from AWS to teach Gold Fields about the utilising the cloud in its operations.
But Gold Fields would need even more help to realise its cloud ambitions. As a multinational with public listings in Johannesburg and New York, it must navigate a minefield of regulations. According to Mudaly, AWS assisted the company in dealing with this complexity from a technology perspective, but Gold Fields also turned to Deloitte for assistance with cloud-related compliance.
“All of the jurisdictions we operate in have some form of privacy laws, both from a data sovereignty and a data privacy perspective, so we had to adhere to those. Of all the regions … Australia was the strictest. Peru required us to show some of our contractual agreements to the regulator for them to understand what we were trying to do,” he said.
He warned that developments in artificial intelligence will only make the regulatory landscape more challenging in the years ahead. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media
