OZ Minerals Creates 5-Year Tech Plan to Grow Operations

Follow @BizReviewAU

A five-year ICT strategy developed by copper miner OZ Minerals aims to drive its mining operations across Australia and overseas, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The company’s tech department was first restructured following the 2008 merger of Oxiana and Zinifex that initially established OZ Minerals, but OZ Minerals ICT general manager Bradley Winks’ said the company’s ICT division was in a “less than desirable state” following a more recent review of the environment.

"We found ourselves in the unique position of having to work on all aspects of the environment at the one time, and it led us to explore options not normally available when managing enterprise ICT environments,” Mr Winks told the Sydney Morning Herald.

“We were able to take a clean-sheet approach to the provision of data centre services, and make step changes to our environments to support the future direction of OZ Minerals."

Enlisting the assistance of Dimension Data, OZ Minerals consolidated its 50 physical services and 65 virtual services across three data centres in Melbourne and Brisbane down to seven physical Telstra-supported machines in Melbourne and a disaster recovery site in Sydney.

The “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) model utilised by OZ Minerals has reportedly become the biggest cloud computing category ahead of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is forecast to become a $44 billion market by the year’s end.

"Further out we will be looking at broader pit-to-port optimisation initiatives, and innovation opportunities such as consolidation of mine operations control rooms," Mr Winks said.

[Photo sourced from The Australian]