Case Study

Edison’s Journey to the Cloud

A Successful Cloud Transformation Story

Edison's challenge

Edison S.p.A is the oldest energy company in Europe, boasting over 135 years of achievements, and is one of the sector’s leading operators in Italy. The company is at the forefront of the energy transition challenge, investing in the field of renewable energy, energy efficiency, digitalisation and the end market. In a rapidly changing market, Edison has made innovation a strategic cornerstone of its development. Digitalisation, the use of data and artificial intelligence are key aspects of the innovation that the company brings to the energy sector by fostering the development of renewables, while always offering its customers new services and supporting the evolution of the energy industry.

With its proven ability to innovate and its customer-first approach to digital transformation, Edison ICT decided to perform a radical transformation and migration from on-premises business applications to the Cloud - an effort aimed to improve productivity, operational resiliency, business agility, while incidentally lowering IT costs.

A Solid Partner for a Successful Cloud Migration & Transformation Story

Storm Reply, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with well-established migration and transformation methods amassed through years of experience, supported Edison ICT to design and implement an entirely new Virtual Data Center, leveraging the powerful Amazon Web Services.

The Cloud Migration Strategy

Network and security infrastructure

An initial deep assessment phase defines the right migration path and transformation approach through architectural blueprints. Then, an advanced Cloud Landing Zone is designed and deployed following best practices. Specifically, a well-defined account strategy and layers definition allowed Edison to improve security and segregation of duties for every workload in Cloud.

Storm Reply put special attention on infrastructure, network, and security aspects in order to guarantee business continuity. Fault tolerance was addressed by means of distributed architectures with high-available managed services and best-of-breed technology solutions. Security aspects are also considered by means of several AWS services for perimetral defense and layers protection, as well as internal auditing and threats monitoring.

AWS services

AWS CDK for Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) definition in conjunction with configuration management for task automation are extensively used in order to speed-up the delivery process and guarantee deployments based on architectural blueprints. Moreover, Cloud native architectures are designed relying on serverless and fully managed services, such as AWS Lambda, API Gateway, SNS, SQS, and so on. The efficient Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is widely adopted in order to deploy and orchestrate elastic and high-available microservices architectures.

Furthermore, all the main network AWS services are exploited to achieve a fault tolerant and segregated design based on Direct Connect, Direct Connect Gateway, and Transit Gateway.

Finally, security aspects are seriously considered to enforce the Virtual Data Center. Specifically, AWS VPC Flow Logs and CloudTrail services are exploited for network traffic and API calls collections, respectively. Thus, Security Groups, Network ACL, Web Application Firewall (WAF), CloudFront, and other AWS services help with hardening the infrastructure.

Storm Reply

Storm Reply is the Reply Group company specialised in the design and implementation of cloud-based solutions and services. As an Amazon Premier Consulting Partner, Storm Reply supports a large number of medium-large size customers in Europe, by maintaining their systems and applications on the AWS platform. With a consolidated experience in Cloud IaaS, SaaS and PaaS services, Storm Reply provides a series of end-to-end services for the adoption of the Cloud, the development of new applications and the comprehensive management of associated cloud-based services.