Nornickel has moved the development of products for mining and geological modelling and planning to Yandex Cloud’s infrastructure, development and data platform services. The cloud infrastructure was deployed within the shortest time possible. Previously, the Company had used in-house servers for these purposes. As a result, some of ML-related processes have been accelerated by as much as 18%.
Nornickel has switched to Yandex Cloud products not only to meet its internal needs, but also to develop the products for the Metallurgy Industrial Competence Centre (ICC). Specifically, the Company is running three projects such as the Mining and Geological Information System, the Mining Operations Planning AMS and the Underground Mining Control.
According to the Company, the migration to cloud services has helped propel many processes. For example, the allocation of in-house capacity and setting up servers for a project, which used to take up to 10 days, can now be completed within just one day in the cloud infrastructure. Creating a ML model, developing and testing software internally could take as long as a month. Doing the same in the cloud reduces timing to an average of 15–16 days, depending on the complexity of a task.
Aleksey Manikhin, Head of IT Strategy and Development at Nornickel, commented: “Like any other industry players, we are just at the start of the journey to embrace the cloud for individual projects, given that M&M companies have set the bar high for information security. Before we began our partnership with Yandex Cloud, we have done a number of tests and made sure that the services were reliable, stable, and secure. As can be seen even for smaller scale projects, product development is becoming faster and faster. Our DevOps engineers found it easy to migrate and manage services in the cloud environment. They can handle many tasks on their own, without involving the service provider.”
Alexander Chernikov, Chief Revenue Officer at Yandex Cloud, commented: “In the global market, the digital development of industrial majors has long been intertwined with cloud technologies. I am confident that strong local cloud players and great demand for new digital solutions from industry players will also foster technological alliances between them and, consequently, accelerate market-wide development. The first steps have been taken.”
Nornickel is ramping up the use of cloud technologies for business. Particularly, the Company is exploring opportunities offered by language models and big data mining. Our team are planning to introduce the DevSecOps platform to integrate security testing into software development.
PJSC MMC Norilsk Nickel is a diversified mining and metallurgical company, the world's largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel, and the world's leading producer of platinum, cobalt, copper and rhodium. The company also produces silver, gold, iridium, ruthenium, selenium, tellurium, sulfur among other products.
The production divisions of the Norilsk Nickel group of companies are located in Russia in the Norilsk industrial region, on the Kola Peninsula and in the Trans-Baikal Territory, as well as in Finland.
In Russia, the company's shares are admitted to trading on the Moscow and St. Petersburg stock exchanges, and its American depository receipts are admitted to trading on the St. Petersburg stock exchange.
The group's products are supplied to 37 countries in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Americas. It is acquired by more than 400 partner companies. Its sales offices operate in Switzerland, China and the USA.
Norilsk Nickel fully supports the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For the company, adherence to the principles of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility is an integral part of efficient operations and business development. Norilsk Nickel is constantly improving its environmental protection activities, human rights protection policy, industrial security and health safety, environmental impact assessment, and biodiversity conservation. The company spent 333 billion rubles on projects related to sustainable development in 2022.
