Due to the critical nature of these services and the role the administration plays in regulating the Italian energy sector, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customer-facing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, even in the face of a cyber-attack.
Download a Copy Now
The Energy Sector Clearinghouse (CSEA) is a government-owned body which operates in the electric, gas and water sectors. It was created in 1961 when all the tariffs in Italy were unified.
Originally, the main goal was to avoid high tariffs for final users: companies with particular operating conditions were subsided via an equalization system and this cost was borne by final users. Today, CSEA is in charge of gathering funds from companies (suppliers and distributors) as established by the Authority for Electricity, Gas and Water (AEEGSI) and/or the government and it properly reallocates these funds to the operators of electricity, gas and water sectors.
CSEA manages the mentioned funds, from the moment of cash in until cash out. In addition, it performs inspections on behalf of the authority, manages the general and specific equalization systems, and carries out operative, managerial and supporting activities in the field of electric system research.
Business Need
Under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance and the Italian Energy and Water Authority, CSEA collects funds from utility suppliers and distributors and reallocates these funds to electric, gas and water sectors, in addition to conducting market research on energy consumption, long-term sustainability, and more. Due to the critical nature of these services and the role the administration plays in regulating the Italian energy sector, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customerfacing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, evening in the face of a cyber-attack.
Challenges
This means maintaining 100% uptime and business continuity for its customers, evening in the face of a cyber-attack. To address this need, CSEA identified a series of cyber security and application load balancing infrastructure improvements that could be made. For application and network security, the IT department at CSEA had relied on the native security capabilities of individual servers. This resulted in a manual, resource-intensive process that made it difficult to implement infrastructurewide security updates and policies.
In addition, as CSEA upgraded its data centers to a modern, high-availability cluster infrastructure, it identified the need to deploy next generation load balancing capabilities to drive data center scalability and allow new applications/services to be deployed without incurring performance degradation.
The Solution
Why Radware’s Solution
Radware could provide CSEA with both market-leading cyber security and next generation load balancing solutions and was ultimately selected for its pricing, breadth of functionality and ease of deployment and management.
To accomplish these goals, CSEA was seeking to partner with a vendor that could provide both market-leading cyber security and improved infrastructure availability solutions at a reasonable price. After conducting an evaluation of various suite solution providers, Radware was ultimately selected for its pricing, breadth of functionality and ease of deployment and solution management. Radware DefensePro and AppWall was implemented for cyber security and Alteon NG for
advanced load balancing capabilities.
Part of Radware’s Attack Mitigation System, DefensePro is an attack mitigation device that protects infrastructure against network and application attacks while AppWall is a web application firewall that safeguards Web applications from advanced HTTP attacks, brute force assaults, Web application attacks, and more.
Alteon is Radware’s next generation application delivery controller (ADC) designed to guarantee application SLAs in any operational scenario by providing end-to-end load balancing capabilities for Web, cloud and mobile-based applications. Radware’s AppXML was also implemented to provide CSEA with a comprehensive Web services gateway that would improve the speed of document processing and secures XML-based communications.
Radware DefensePro is an attack mitigation device that protects infrastructure against network and application attacks while AppWall is a web application firewall that safeguards Web applications from advanced HTTP attacks, brute force assaults, and more. For application load balancing, AlteonNG is Radware’s next generation application delivery controller designed to guarantee application SLAs in any operational scenario by providing end-to-end load balancing capabilities for Web, cloud and mobile-based applications.
Benefits
By implementing Radware’s suite of products, CSEA has simplified its infrastructure management procedures, scaled its infrastructure, and implemented strong protection of its applications and data center infrastructure; ensuring 100% uptime of its products and services for its customers. When CSEA experienced a DDoS attack, Radware’s DDoS mitigation solutions successfully mitigated the assault and ensured that service levels were maintained throughout all phases of the attack.
Since implementing Radware, CSEA has simplified its infrastructure management procedures, increased the scalability of its infrastructure, and successfully mitigated a DDoS attack, allowing CSEA to maintain 100% uptime of its products/services to Italian energy and utility providers.