Executive Summary
A global base metals mining company operating 12 mine sites across four continents faced a growing operational and security challenge: how to provide timely, secure remote access for OEM vendors servicing complex ore processing equipment in some of the world's most remote locations. With sites spanning Africa, South America, Canada, and Australia, the company was spending over $3 million annually on vendor travel and still experiencing response times measured in days, not hours.
The company relied on eight different vendor-specific remote access tools, each representing an unmanaged pathway into its SCADA and DCS systems. Physical site visits were not only expensive ($5,000 to $15,000 per trip) but also hazardous, requiring personnel to enter underground workings, open-pit operations, and processing plants with extreme environmental conditions.
By deploying the Xona Platform across all 12 sites, including DIN-rail hardware for harsh environments and cellular backup for the four most remote locations, the company consolidated eight remote access tools into a single, secure platform. Vendor response times dropped from days to minutes, annual travel costs fell by $2.1 million, and the organization achieved alignment with IEC 62443 security requirements, all without disrupting production operations.
The Challenge
The company's 12 mine sites span some of the most challenging environments on earth. Four of the most remote sites, two in sub-Saharan Africa, one in Northern Canada, and one in the Australian outback, had limited or satellite-only internet connectivity. Bandwidth at these locations was inconsistent and often insufficient for conventional remote access tools.
Over time, the company had accumulated eight different vendor-specific remote access tools. Some used TeamViewer, others used vendor-proprietary VPN clients, and several had deployed standing VPN tunnels that remained active even when no maintenance was being performed. The OT security team had no centralized visibility into who was accessing which systems, when, or for how long.
The cost of waiting for physical visits was not abstract. At one Zambian site, a variable-frequency drive failure on a primary SAG mill shut down the grinding circuit entirely. The nearest qualified technician was in Zurich. The technician did not arrive for five days, costing an estimated $480,000 in lost copper production. The equipment issue was a configuration error the technician resolved in under two hours. With secure remote access, it could have been diagnosed and corrected in minutes.
The Xona Solution
The company selected the Xona Platform as its enterprise-standard platform for OEM and third-party remote access to all processing plant OT systems. Several factors drove the selection: Xona's pixel-streaming architecture terminates OT protocols inside the plant network so vendors interact through encrypted pixel streams with no direct endpoint-to-asset connectivity; PNG-based pixel rendering is specifically designed for constrained links including satellite connections; DIN-rail form factor hardware compliant with IEC 61850 and IEEE 1613 can be deployed without requiring dedicated server rooms; and cellular backup modems provide emergency access continuity during primary link outages.
The deployment began with a pilot at the largest copper-gold processing plant, operational within 25 minutes with no network reconfiguration. Following the successful pilot, Xona CSGs were deployed across all 12 sites over a 10-week period. DIN-rail hardware was deployed at eight sites with space-constrained or harsh-environment control rooms. Cellular backup modems were deployed at the four most remote sites. All eight legacy vendor remote access tools were decommissioned as each site came online.
The Results:
Vendor response time was reduced from 3 to 7 days for physical site visits to under 15 minutes for remote session initiation. OEM follow-the-sun support became a reality, with vendors in different time zones supporting any site at any hour. Mean time to repair for OEM-supported equipment fell by 68%, directly improving processing plant availability.
Physical vendor visits to underground and open-pit operations were reduced by 73%, directly lowering the company's exposure hours for third-party personnel in hazardous environments. Annual vendor travel costs were reduced from $3.2 million to $1.1 million, a savings of $2.1 million per year. Estimated production uptime gains of $4.2 million annually are attributable to faster issue resolution and reduced equipment downtime.
Eight unmanaged remote access tools were consolidated to one centrally managed platform with full session recording, individual user accountability, and role-based access controls. The company achieved alignment with IEC 62443 requirements for identification and authentication, use control, data confidentiality, and audit.
"We were flying technicians to the Zambian Copperbelt for issues that Xona now resolves in fifteen minutes. The response time improvement alone paid for the platform in the first month."
VP Technical Services, Global Mining Company
