Nornickel, Yandex Cloud and Crosstech Team Up to Strengthen Cyber Resilience in Mining and Metals
At the CIPR-2026 forum, Nornickel signed two strategic cybersecurity agreements with Crosstech and Yandex Cloud aimed at improving cyber resilience across both the company and the broader mining-and-metals sector.
The partnership with Yandex Cloud focuses on the secure deployment of AI, protection of industrial IT systems and the development of reference architectures for hybrid and cloud infrastructure. The agreement with Crosstech includes cyber threat intelligence sharing, joint cyber exercises and testing of Russian infrastructure-protection technologies.
Nornickel is a backbone industrial mining-and-metals company, and the security of its production systems is directly tied to supply-chain resilience, export revenues, industrial safety and technological sovereignty.
The collaboration between companies of this scale is expected to reduce the risk of industrial accidents, operational disruptions, supply interruptions and data leaks. Protection of critical industrial assets could become more reliable, while Russian expertise in secure industrial AI, cloud infrastructure and cyber incident response is likely to expand significantly.
Building Hybrid Infrastructure
The agreement outlines a transition from isolated protection of individual IT systems toward a broader cyber-resilience model covering the entire industrial environment. The partnership with Yandex Cloud is expected to help Nornickel build a unified security framework for hybrid infrastructure. At the same time, visibility into cybersecurity processes and oversight of industrial systems are expected to improve. The companies have already tested an approach in which AI agents operate entirely within the corporate network, without internet access and without storing data on the provider side. That is particularly important for production data and sensitive technological parameters.
If standardized architectures, cyber exercise methodologies and secure industrial AI models are formalized, the approach could first scale across other Russian companies and later expand to friendly international markets in mining, metallurgy and adjacent industries.
Threat Intelligence Sharing
Nornickel expanded its use of Yandex Cloud infrastructure for internal IT operations and metallurgy-focused industrial competency-center projects back in 2023. That work became the technological foundation for the current agreement. A year later, the company signed a partnership with Rostelecom to strengthen cyber resilience in the mining-and-metals sector and expanded its work around vulnerabilities and cyber incidents, including testing of industrial control systems. The agreements with Yandex Cloud and Crosstech extend that broader strategy of technology alliances.
Threat activity targeting Russian companies, including industrial organizations, increased significantly in 2025. Positive Technologies reported that industry accounted for roughly 13% of successful attacks. The most common attack vectors included malware, social engineering and exploitation of vulnerabilities. That makes agreements centered on incident-data sharing and cyber exercises especially significant.
In 2026, Nornickel and Yandex Cloud also disclosed a secure approach to deploying AI agents. According to Forbes, the company has already integrated them into more than 30 production and corporate processes. The implementation relied on a hybrid architecture combining in-house computing resources with Yandex Cloud infrastructure.
IT Partnerships Become an Industry Standard
The agreement and its implications sit at the intersection of several major trends simultaneously: industrial cybersecurity, secure AI, cloud infrastructure, import-independent technology stacks and protection of critical production systems.
Analysts expect these kinds of partnerships to become standard practice for large industrial enterprises over the next several years as attacks grow more sophisticated and threat actors shift from mass DDoS campaigns and phishing toward advanced intrusion methods and long-term persistence inside infrastructure environments.
For Nornickel, the initiative could become the foundation for its own industrial cyber-resilience model. For the broader market, it serves as a case study in how scalable approaches like this could become reference models for companies in metallurgy, mining, energy and other sectors operating critical information infrastructure.
