EGA powers innovation with Azure Arc’s hybrid infrastructure; reduces power costs by more than 80%

Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), the world’s largest producer of premium aluminium, depends on uninterrupted plant operations to maintain around-the-clock metal production. To enhance operational efficiency and safeguard continuous performance, EGA implemented a hybrid cloud strategy powered by Azure Arc.

Azure, a Microsoft product acts as a bridge, extending the Azure platform to enable seamless application and service development across data centres, edge locations, and multi-cloud environments. It empowers to build cloud-native solutions with a unified approach to development, operations, and security, ensuring consistency wherever your workloads run.

As per the report published by Microsoft, by leveraging a hybrid infrastructure managed by Azure Arc, EGA seamlessly integrated its on-premises data centres with the cloud, enhancing production efficiency and enabling advanced AI and automation solutions. Microsoft had further announced about the hybrid infrastructure on their official YouTube channel.

“We use the best of the Azure public cloud but we also brought the power of Azure back to our plants. When we compare our old setup of running AI compared to our new hybrid setup, we observed the drop in costs by more than 80 per cent. It’s massive. Here in Emirates Global Aluminium we are innovating aluminium to make modern life possible,” said Alexander Simon, EGA’s director of digital platforms and infrastructure.  

He notes that AI-powered decision-making is now 13 times faster, and by replicating and scaling its infrastructure, EGA can share its aluminium smelting technology with other countries — opening the door to a new revenue stream for the company.

As a manufacturing company, EGA has a lot of critical metal infrastructure for its plants. These infrastructures are the reason why the manufacturing process happens throughout the clock without any hindrance. To make the ongoing process smooth, EGA adopted the hybrid cloud approach. Some of the other Azure services implemented by EGA include –

• Azure hyperconverged infrastructure
• Azure Arc
• Azure Kubernetes services
• Azure database