Exxaro unites on-premises and cloud infrastructure into a single monitoring solution with Azure Arc

Bringing a single monitoring interface to life

With Exxaro teams working across a range of sites—from the field to production and manufacturing locations to branch offices—the company struggled to manage its widespread infrastructure in an efficient and holistic manner. Exxaro expanded its scope and sought to consolidate and enhance oversight of its operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and IT environments in Azure.

To better support operational and IT teams throughout the company, Exxaro wanted to improve visibility into its assets and reduce the amount of time engineers spent managing them. It set out to adopt a single monitoring interface with consistent security and patch deployment regardless of servers’ locations. So, when Exxaro discovered Azure Arc, it became an early adopter. The holistic solution connected the company with a set of technologies that link Azure security and cloud-native services together and provide easy monitoring across multiple products, including Azure Monitor and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

“You can’t manage what you don’t know, so we were ready to pivot to Azure Arc to promote further innovation and transformation in our company,” says Louis Retief, Head of Innovation and Information Management at Exxaro.

The power of operational visibility and linking multiple environments together

Exxaro had already moved the enterprise-level operating environments used by its head office teams to the Microsoft cloud, but its field sites were located in quite remote areas with limited connectivity and thus relied on on-premises infrastructure and OT environments. This hybrid model worked well for Exxaro in theory, but in practice, the added hassle of managing multiple environments separately restricted productivity and operational visibility.

“We had two scenarios—we monitored our cloud resources using Azure Monitor and our on-premises environment using other tools,” explains Simphiwe Makhoba, Principal Architect at Exxaro. “We had no means of seeing our environment end to end in one view, and we needed to understand the state of our operations, resource utilization, and system status.”

Now running with more than 200 Arc-enabled servers and counting, Exxaro has achieved much-needed visibility while uniting its infrastructure across both its on-premises and cloud environments. Given the company’s complex operating environment, Exxaro carried out a proof of concept for Azure Arc and worked closely with Azure engineers to accelerate time to market and avoid undue disruption.

Exxaro valued the opportunity to use Azure Arc to move forward on its cloud journey yet keep some of its critical resources on-premises. “We did not want to open up our OT environment, which is the processing environment in our field sites, to the internet because of its lack of reliability in those areas. If a connection were to go down, that plant would stop,” continues Makhoba. Each remote location has dedicated IT infrastructure, which is now connected through Azure Arc for unified management and visibility.

Enhanced information sensors, security, and storage within an end-to-end monitoring story

Deploying Azure Arc made it fast and easy for Exxaro to strengthen its infrastructure management and security posture while maintaining its hybrid setup. The company has IoT sensors that track everything from truck activity on field sites to driver fatigue. It deployed Azure IoT Edge on-premises to consolidate all that operational data, which Exxaro manages through Azure IoT Hub and uses to not only track the health of its state and firmware but drive productivity gains and new efficiencies. The company then safeguards its individual sensors with Defender for IoT.

Exxaro uses Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel through Azure Arc to apply advanced threat protection and threat hunting capabilities across the company’s other on-premises and cloud resources. Microsoft Sentinel performs this analysis on data stored in Log Analytics workspaces in Azure Monitor, which helps improve not only threat detection but also firmware checks and security team response.

“We gained the freedom of knowledge by deploying Azure Arc. Now, when someone asks what’s going on in our environments, we can open Azure Monitor and easily understand what’s happening,” says Makhoba. “We couldn’t do that when things were separated, siloed, and managed by different teams.”

Exxaro’s cloud workloads are also supported by Azure Disk Storage, including Azure Premium SSD disks for critical workloads like financial systems and an Azure Standard SSD option for production workloads, and backups are held in Azure Blob Storage. “Initially, we used Premium SSD for everything, but as we understood our workloads and environment utilization more thanks to Azure Arc and Azure Monitor, we were able to optimize and lower our costs, choosing specific drives for specific workloads based on demand and criticality,” explains Makhoba.

By bringing together this all-encompassing variety of Azure resources, Exxaro has developed its own reliable and end-to-end monitoring story—from security to health and performance monitoring. “It’s easy for us now to show our executives where our strengths lie, what we need, and where we may be regressing,” says Makhoba. “It doesn’t matter where our information is. With Azure Arc, we can pull up everything across our on-premises and cloud workloads, identify issues, and ultimately perform better than before within our infrastructure and security posture.”

A future defined by unified operations and near-limitless growth opportunities

Having a single monitoring solution for its workloads helps Exxaro and its teams better understand assets’ availability at any given time. “Initially, we had two different tools. It was tedious for our engineering and operational teams to sign into one tool for on-premises workloads and use another for the cloud resources,” recalls Makhoba. “By streamlining management of our hybrid environments using Azure Arc, our teams have clear operational insights and can respond faster if there are any issues.”

Exxaro’s employees also benefit from more accurate information about governance and risk. For example, they can easily confirm whether servers are compliant and if there’s enough capacity to scale up or down when necessary. “We consider our adoption of Azure Arc not just a tool upgrade but part of our greater shift to embracing cloud capabilities and streamlining our entire operations while maintaining necessary on-premises workloads,” says Makhoba.

To continue its cloud transformation success via joint management and operations of its hybrid model, Exxaro is evaluating additional capabilities within Azure Arc, including database and application monitoring. “The long-term plan for us is to make Azure Arc the overall tool for our infrastructure,” says Makhoba. “In addition to the infrastructure component, we can use it to improve our applications, monitor our DevOps pipeline, and explore many other capabilities for the future.”

Exxaro’s leaders are also dreaming big when it comes to thinking about innovative applications of Microsoft technology.

They’re particularly excited about the potential of automation to make tasks easier for workers. “I think we’re quite advanced in terms of what opportunities exist for digitalization, visualization, and IoT in the energy industry,” says Retief. “We’ve done some work in automated drills and testing automated trucks. But the opportunity is there for our next big shift, which is to start automating our truck fleets and achieve higher levels of automation using Microsoft tools.”

Outside of making technological advancements, the company’s investments in the cloud have helped fuel its sustainability initiatives, bringing Exxaro closer to building a substantial renewable energy business for South Africa and, much like Microsoft, going green in the next 10 years and beyond. Affirms Makhoba, “Accelerating technology adoption through rapid digitization helps our organization to achieve its business objectives, so choosing the right tools and partners is very important for us and we’ve achieved that with Azure.”

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