August 26, 2025
The Vostochny gold mine – kinda traditional; but these days – completely digital.
Hi folks!
Been a while, yes, but – you know: August! :). Meanwhile – rewind: back to July…
I’ve said this many times, but I’ll say it again: practically all industrial facilities – quarries and mines, power plants and factories, trucks and ships – are permeated through and through with all kinds of cyber-technologies. Indeed, the only non-digitized operation I’ve seen in the last 10 years or so is… the production of coconut oil in Fiji! :).
And since the prefix “cyber-” is, alas, increasingly more often followed by “-incident”, the combination of “cyber + security” is also becoming increasingly popular and in-demand – including at industrial facilities. It’s for this very reason we work closely with a wide variety of manufacturing companies. Over the years, such partnerships have become more and more based on trust – and with that comes our being invited to visit production sites to see how things actually work. And that’s what happened on our July trip to Krasnoyarsk (which I gave a brief summary of in my last post a month ago): We express our appreciation of and respect for our clients, and at the same time satisfy our own curiosity. After all, it truly is very, very interesting to see up close different lesser-known aspects of just how this world really ticks! Not on a TV screen sat in the office or on the couch at home – but in person and live: from a front-row seat and with full immersion, so to speak.
In just three days we managed to visit a whole five sites – the first of which was the Vostochny (“Eastern”) open-pit mine, where the company Polyus (pronounced pOl-yoos) mines gold. And since this quarry is one of the deepest in the world (more precisely, the second deepest – after the US’s Bingham Canyon Mine), it was doubly interesting to see this man-made wonder with our own eyes:
This is what the mine looks like from up above:
An impressive structure!