Mining company Gold Fields has migrated its SAP and treasury systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Revealed at the recent AWS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gold Fields has been able to adopt advanced analytics, machine learning (ML), and generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities through the cloud migration.

Strini Mudaly, group ICT vice president at Johannesburg-based Gold Fields, said of the move that the company was "delegating data responsibilities to the specialists who can deliver the most value."

Mudaly added: "AWS is helping us modernize our infrastructure, improve our governance, and drive cost efficiencies. We selected AWS as our cloud provider of choice, based on its proven operational experience at scale and commitment to innovation. We are excited to continue our journey with AWS, leveraging its expertise and cutting-edge solutions to transform our business."

The migration was conducted in partnership with Deloitte, and has seen Gold Fields migrate its SAP estates across three continents to AWS.

"By bringing together a multi-disciplinary team of dedicated Deloitte experts working across multiple time zones, we ensured every aspect of the migration, including data privacy, regulatory, and technology was handled with precision and expertise, delivering a seamless, zero-business-impact transition," said Aasif Karachi, director and Africa AWS leader at Deloitte Consulting.

"Leveraging AWS's secure and scalable infrastructure, this migration has reduced operational costs and enhanced data processing speeds across critical group systems, all while upholding Gold Fields strong governance and risk management standards."

Deloitte assisted Gold Fields with the complexity of cloud-related compliance across its operations.

“All of the jurisdictions we operate in have some form of privacy laws, both from a data sovereignty and a data privacy perspective, so we had to adhere to those. Of all the regions … Australia was the strictest. Peru required us to show some of our contractual agreements to the regulator for them to understand what we were trying to do,” explained Mudaly of the challenge with regulations.

Gold Fields will also use AWS' Industrial Data Fabric and generative AI capability for its data management practices, hoping to support safety and process improvements, and will use predictive models to determine when machinery will need maintenance.

The migration project has been ongoing since 2022.

Gold Fields operates in very challenging locations, with some of its migrations as deep as 4km underground with temperatures reaching 66 degrees Celsius (151 F). The company also has mining operations in Chile's Atacama Desert which is 5,000m above sea level and has temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius (-4 F).

Operating IT equipment in these conditions is challenging, as is maintaining connectivity at such remote locations.

Mudaly noted the role Amazon's Project Kuiper had played in selecting a cloud provider.

“There are a number of low-Earth orbit satellite solutions already available, but Kuiper is working to bring an enterprise-grade solution to market, which is what we need. Integration with AWS is also important to us,” said Mudaly.

Thus far, the migration project has been successful, with Mudaly noting that it has "reduced operational costs and enhanced data processing speeds, all while upholding Gold Fields' strong governance and risk management standards."

Gold Fields is a gold mining company that is listed on both the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. The company was first founded in 1887 as Gold Fields of South Africa Limited, later combined with Gencor Limited in 1998. The company owns and operates mines in South Africa, Ghana, Australia, and Peru.