Great Basin Gold turns to Cisco network solution from Datacentrix

International gold mining company Great Basin Gold, listed on the New York, Toronto and Johannesburg stock exchanges, has completed the implementation of a highly secure IT network at its local headquarters in Sandton in collaboration with IT business value and solutions provider, Datacentrix.

As a major vendor in SA for international networking solutions provider, Datacentrix provided Great Basin Gold (GBG) with Cisco networking equipment and an initial network design, later fine-tuned to meet GBG's very specific requirements.

A major driver behind the new networking solution is to ensure that GBG continues to fully comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that has become the benchmark for new and enhanced financial reporting and compliance standards for all US public companies and public accounting firms.

"The network design phase took two weeks and the required Cisco networking equipment was imported from the distribution centre in Belgium," says GBG Sandton network administrator, Arnold de Bruin. "We are audited twice a year for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and it is a complex process that needs to take place in a streamlined but highly secure environment."

The Cisco networking solution provides very high levels of control and tracking. De Bruin says it also automatically delivers the very specific reports required by Sarbanes-Oxley, logs every transaction and produces a complete daily data log and back-up.

"The end result is a solution that provides a full audit trail of the business in the form of logs that can be extracted from the Cisco system. It is impossible to alter or manipulate the transaction logs, offering GBG solid protection and ensuring compliance."

Cisco fully integrates with Microsoft Active Directory and de Bruin says this ensures that people who do not have the required permission status will not be able to access the system compliance data.

Duncan van Jaarsveld, the business unit manager of Datacentrix's Infrastructure Networking division, says that to attain the high level of security required, Cisco ASA Firewalls were installed and the Catalyst 4500 chassis was selected to address the networking needs. Cisco WAN accelerators are also being used to provide high-speed, non-stop networking on the backbone links.

GBG operates the Burnstone gold mine near Balfour south-east of Johannesburg. A shallow, low cost, low risk mine, it is scheduled to be fully commissioned at the end of this year. Average annual production is expected to be more than

250 000 ounces of gold and the mine life projection is 19 years. The company has another major gold mine, Hollister, which operates in Nevada in the US.