Citic Pacific Mining

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Vision

One of CPM’s priorities is to implement a modern and flexible environment in which the IT team, and its customers, can safely experiment with innovative ideas and release them rapidly into the business.  A key part of such an environment is a secure, cost-efficient cloud platform.  The strategy was shaped by the need to consolidate CPM’s data centres, support the take-up of agile consumption-based services, and the urgent replacement of the legacy disaster recovery site.  “This was a challenging brief but estrat’s reputation for delivering the goods is well established in the industry, so we were confident they could give us all the benefits that the AWS service stack promised."

Traction

CPM activated the cloud adoption roadmap which estrat had developed for it earlier. Stringent compliance and security requirements underpinned the design and solution choices, as did the need to meet demanding agility, cost, performance and technical-fit goals.  Rapid execution allowed CPM to address the imperative of moving its development and DR workloads while simultaneously acquiring a completely transformational capability to deliver data analytics in ways that would previously have been too costly and time consuming.  estrat worked with CPM’s IT team and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to architect a cloud-centric platform that would meet all the fundamental requirements for security, agility, value and longevity.  AWS’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), DirectConnect and Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) services form the core of the new environment. Together they host more than eighty-five DR, development and production workloads.  A simple but effective DR solution was built using CloudEndure. Data analytics and Internet of Things (IOT) capability was added almost instantaneously using AWS Kinesis, Cognito and API Gateway services.  “With both a great platform in AWS and excellent support partners in estrat, we were able to move quickly when the opportunity presented itself to inject a major step change in our infrastructure environment. This has opened up further doors for us to exploit new technology in the cloud and it’s great to see our strategic vision playing out through this transition. We’ve been able to turn an unexpected problem, in the form of a data centre closure, into a big strategic win for our business.”

Results

CPM has been able to retire significant portions of its legacy infrastructure, and has streamlined its back-office processes associated with data protection and DR.  The new platform enables a strategic approach to infrastructure and applications delivery that is completely aligned with CPM’s business strategy of unlocking the full value of its broader investment.  “We’ve found a secure and truly agile platform that supports our ability to experiment, innovate and iteratively deliver value to our business. At the same time, by leveraging AWS’s service stack and estrat’s industry knowledge and delivery expertise, we can keep a keen eye on security, performance and cost.”