The company is keen to play a role in shaping industry standards on data interoperability.

Its data interoperability policy outlines the principles behind Sandvik's digital offering, explaining, for example, how data can be accessed depending on the customer's fleet at equipment level, at server level onsite or within cloud.

It also outlines how that data is protected.

The policy is designed to ensure the highest levels of data privacy and security while ensuring the customer retains all rights to data related to their equipment use.

The policy has been designed with the European Union data protection and privacy law the General Data Protection Regulation in mind. The law comes into effect on May 25 and also applies to the export of personal data across the EU.

Sandvik Mining and Rock technology president, rock drills and technologies Patrick Murphy said customers were increasingly looking to digital technologies to enable optimised processes.

"Sandvik systems and equipment will form a key part of the digital ecosystems at the mines in the future," he said.

"Our customers have naturally asked that they can access equipment health and productivity data from the solutions that we provide them.

"While interfaces are not available for all the equipment models today, these will be progressively rolled out as new products come to market.

"However, there are, today, already more than 1000 machines connected to our industry-leading, cloud-connected productivity and eCommerce platform My Sandvik, as well as the more advanced OptiMine mining process optimisation platform.

"Data interfaces can be created so that the customer can access the raw data from these offerings."

Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology general counsel Manny Maloney said the company knew cloud-based data processing services offered tremendous advantage over local server-based solutions and were critical in leveraging the full potential of the industrial Internet of Things.

"And when our customers choose us to process data on their behalf, we don't take it lightly," he said.

"Access to data needs to be defined and restricted because it is often operator related and commercially sensitive."

Sandvik's digital offering ranges from systems for autonomous equipment and features such as its Automine platform to systems for process management and optimisation.

It also includes tailored data analytics solutions.

These systems will likely play an essential role within the larger digital ecosystem at customers' sites.

Sandvik systems will be able to interface and exchange data with other systems around the operation, ensuring the value of the data can be unlocked.