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Mining benefits from cloud adoption


Johannesburg, 03 Nov 2014

Mining companies around the world are facing many challenges, such as managing unique operational complexities and staying profitable in tough economic times, under tremendous global pressures. "Cloud has long been touted as one of the Internet's greatest success stories, revolutionising many industries by improving operations, efficiencies, accuracy and so on," says Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH. "Mining is no different, and we are seeing organisations in this sector realising the potential of cloud in transforming the industry, and slowly embarking on a cloud journey."

Vester says cloud is set to be a major driver for growth in the mining industry, which is very competitive, and deals with fixed resources. "Mining organisations who adopt cloud can look forward to vast improvements in operations and well as major returns on investments. At the same time, adopting cloud will greatly reduce general running costs."

Speaking of increased efficiencies, he says cloud simplifies operations by boosting automation, therefore lessening the number of tasks that need to be done manually. "In fact, many tasks can be automated completely through the cloud, which in turn increases consistency in operations, and lowers the chance of any equipment failures."

This in turn will ultimately reduce expenses. "All businesses today need to do more with less. The pressure is on to increase revenue and cut costs, and mining organisations are in the same boat. Here again, cloud can be of enormous benefit. Firstly, the burden of ownership is removed, and alongside that, the burden of maintenance and servicing. No huge capital expenditure is needed, reducing start-up and operational costs, and maintenance and suchlike now falls under the purview of the cloud provider."

Vester says consuming infrastructure, applications and services via the cloud enables mining businesses to be far more flexible, as these services can be tailored, and then adapted to the businesses' needs as they evolve. In terms of ERP, workflow, scheduling, business intelligence, payroll ? the list goes on ? Vester says all of these functions can be migrated to the cloud to further lower costs.

For mining companies that have multiple mines, across several locations, cloud will assist with centralising functions and controls, and will also standardise operations across the disparate locations. "This in turn allows mines to share their infrastructure across their multiple sites, allowing them to take advantage of economies of scale. Moreover, centralisation and standardisation allows mining companies to be far more agile."

"There is also the question of 'being green', and lowering the mining industry's carbon footprint," he adds. "Cloud computing is a sustainable choice, that greatly lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and saves on power consumption and data centre costs."

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EOH

EOH is one of the largest technology and knowledge services providers in South Africa and provides the technology, knowledge, skills and organizational ability critical to Africa's development and growth. EOH's 6 000 staff members deliver high value, end-to-end enterprise applications solutions, a wide range of outsourcing, network solutions, managed services and business service offerings to customers across all major industries.

EOH is the largest BEE implementer of enterprise applications constantly exceeding customer expectations.

EOH Cloud Services offers fully managed end-to-end, hybrid cloud infrastructure as well as national and global MPLS VPN solutions, voice, metro Ethernet fibre and wireless access, data centre services and a range of Internet and last-mile access solutions.

For more information visit: www.eohcloud.co.za

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