The Harmony Gold Mining Company - one of SA`s most prolific underground and open pit gold mining and exploration companies - has completed a programme to improve and centralise the management of its distributed infrastructure at its Evander, Orkney, Welkom, Virginia and Randfontein mining operations while guarding against security threats and intrusions.
This multimillion-rand initiative - dubbed a "refreshment plan" by the company`s executives - centred on the management of what was described as a "chocolate box" of diverse computer systems and platforms covering the company`s local and wide area communications networks.
It comprises connectivity over Diginet leased lines, fibre optic cable and via radio frequency (RF) between 72 sites nationwide.
The diversity was a consequence of 26 separate corporate acquisitions undertaken by Harmony over the last five years.
Yusuf Jardien, IT and Change Management executive at Harmony, says: "We had to address a host of issues surrounding the management of connectivity applications and IT business solutions, together with the back-end server, router and switch environments on which these function."
Harmony, which has related mining activities in Canada, Australia and Russia, turned to Computer Associates (CA) and its Unicenter software suite to realise its objectives.
CA Unicenter is a family of modular, integrated solutions designed to deliver a fast return on investment, powerful automation facilities and the ability to manage the entire IT infrastructure from a business perspective.
"In selecting Unicenter our goals were to fully understand the nature of the IT services delivered to Harmony`s operations on a per-mine basis, as well as have a corporate `bird`s eye` view of our entire infrastructure," explains Jardien.
"By having knowledge of what goes into delivering these services we are able to gain an accurate view of IT across our operations and take a more scientific approach to managing our infrastructure and the costs thereof.
"We believe that Harmony is successful because it has a clear understanding of the detailed costs associated with its mining processes - particularly in areas where low grade ore is found and operational efficiency is key."
He says CA Unicenter gave Harmony`s IT department the ability to manage the IT domains under its charge with in-depth information relating to availability, capability and performance.
"It helped us gain a clear understanding of Harmony`s IT assets and a thorough understanding of their usage in order for us to provide appropriate services to our customers - together with the tools with which to proactively manage Harmony`s diverse infrastructure."
Harmony selected Unicenter to provide technology to support its management processes which are modelled around the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.
"ITIL, and its various disciplines, allowed us to focus on key IT management processes such as incident, problem and change management," Jardien stresses.
"It allowed us to achieve a better level of professionalism in managing these processes."
Harmony embarked on a business re-engineering programme called the Harmony Business Centric Methodology, which sought to align IT services to performance from a business perspective.
"The implementation of Unicenter and ITIL exposed a number of areas which could be improved upon," notes Vishal Maharaj, Harmony`s Group IT Manager.
"Network performance, stability, scalability and security were high on the list, as was the need to standardise on selected software and ensure that Harmony remained legal from a licensing point of view."
With this in mind, Harmony implemented CA Unicenter in association with other complementary CA systems, including Service Desk, Brightstor and eTrust.
"Service Desk gave us the ability to accurately log, escalate and manage support calls from users to the help-desk. It also enabled us to track success rates against predetermined service level benchmarks," notes Maharaj.
"Managing data storage in an IT environment is becoming increasingly important due to recently published regulatory frameworks and increased user demand for storage availability.
"CA`s Brightstor storage management solutions helped us to manage this data with greater cost-efficiency, as we are able to perform age-analysis on data and assign it to appropriate storage media while remaining within these frameworks.
"The eTrust system`s use of visualisation and advanced forensics analysis methodologies helped us to transform raw security data into actionable business intelligence," he adds.
The entire project was executed by CA`s Services division in cooperation with Xantium Technology Holdings and was completed on time, over a 15-month period, within budget.
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