Norilsk Nickel accelerated the development of IT solutions for metallurgy using Yandex Cloud services

2023: IT Solutions for Metallurgy Transfer to Yandex Cloud

Norilsk Nickel transferred the development of products for mining and geological modeling and planning to the infrastructure, development services and services of the Yandex Cloud data platform. The preparation of the cloud infrastructure took place as soon as possible, representatives of Yandex Cloud said on August 17, 2023. Previously, the company used its own servers for these tasks. According to the customer, some of the processes associated with the creation of machine learning technologies were accelerated by almost 18%.

Norilsk Nickel began to use Yandex Cloud products not only for internal tasks, but also for the development of products of the Industrial Competence Center (ICC). " In Metallurgy particular, the company implements three projects: "Mining and Geological Information System," "ACS Mining Planning" and "Dispatching Underground Mining."

According to the company, the transfer of development to cloud services made it possible to speed up a number of processes. For example, allocating your own capacity and configuring servers for a project could previously take up to 10 days, while in the cloud this can be done in one day. It could take about a month to create a machine learning model, develop software and test in your own infrastructure. Organizing the same process in the cloud reduced these times to an average of 15-16 days, depending on the complexity of the task.

"Like others in the industry, we are just beginning to apply clouds to individual projects. This is due to the fact that metallurgical enterprises have high requirements for information security. Before starting cooperation with Yandex Cloud, we conducted a number of checks and were convinced of the reliability, stable operation and security of services. Even on the example of small projects, we see how product development is accelerating. Our DevOps engineers were easily given the transition and management of services in the cloud. They cope with many tasks on their own, without involving a provider, "commented Alexey Manikhin, director of IT strategy and business applications at Norilsk Nickel.

"In the global market, the digital development of industrial giants has long been inextricably linked to the use of cloud technologies. I am sure that the presence of strong local players in the cloud market and the large demand for new digital solutions from industry participants will also lead to the formation of strong technological alliances between them, and, as a result, accelerate development on the scale of our market. The first steps in this direction have already been taken, "said Alexander Chernikov, Commercial Director of Yandex Cloud.

Nornickel is gradually expanding the use of cloud technologies in business tasks. In particular, the company is exploring the use of language models and deep analysis of big data. In addition, experts plan to implement the DevSecOps platform to integrate security testing into software development.