AET case study

ABOUT AET

Azienda Elettrica Ticinese is a publicly owned company created in 1958 by Canton Ticino for the purpose of producing and trading electricity. AET makes the most of Ticino’s renewable resources and exploits more than one-third of the territory’s water production on behalf of the Canton. It also sells wholesale power to distributors. In more than 50 years of business, AET become the cantonal benchmark in electricity production, transportation and trade. Today, the Company can rely on production from 6 of its own hydroelectric plants, numerous photovoltaic plants and holdings in Switzerland and abroad.

THE CHALLENGE

The steady increase in ransomware attacks on public sector companies prompted AET to adopt a tougher strategy to prevent data loss and ensure its business continuity, even in the event that systems were compromised.

Although, in fact, AET had long strengthened its infrastructure according to Veeam’s best practices, it was aware that an on-premise solution, without off-site copying, did not guarantee optimal data security in the event of an attack.

“The exponential increase in ransomware attacks pushed us to request an overhaul of our backup strategy from 4IT Solutions, which led to the implementation of an even more comprehensive solution.” Commenta Mattia Bardelli, IT/OT security coordinator, AET.

THE SOLUTION

“(…) As soon as we received the request from AET, we immediately identified decentralization and immutability as essential aspects to safeguard the data and consequently the company’s operations.” Comments Barbara Franzetti, Senior System Engineer, 4IT Solutions.

Adding an off-site copy to the existing architecture was a key choice as its cloud-displaced nature would ensure the resilience of the backup against cyber attacks, human error or catastrophic natural events. In addition, by achieving immutability, data have been made impervious to encryption or the threat of deletion by cybercriminals.

Taking advantage of Veeam’s throttling feature, which, by limiting bandwidth consumption, reduced the impact of operations on network performance, 10TB was backed up. “Since there are several important services on the Internet line, such as AET trading, we made sure that backup operations did not saturate bandwidth, negatively impacting users.” The words of Barbara Franzetti, Senior System Engineer, 4IT Solutions.

In addition, because of the improved performance achieved with the new infrastructure, it is possible, if needed, to take advantage of the Instant VM Recovery feature to decrease restore times and SureBackup, which through running multiple tests on backups is able to confirm that the data is free of malware and can be restored.

RESULTS

• Implementation of an off-site backup
• Enhanced data security through immutability
• Additional protection from ransomware
• S3 storage with excellent value for money price

“With Wasabi’s solution, we found the right compromise to implement off-site backup and to achieve immutability with excellent value for money.” Conclude Mattia Bardelli, IT/OT security coordinator, AET.