How Elektro Celje Achieves More with Less to Maximize Efficiency
Published: October 3, 2024
As one of Slovenia's five electricity distribution companies, Elektro Celje plays a key role in developing the country's cost-effective distribution network, which supplies electricity to individual and industrial consumers. With a relatively small team, the company’s IT department must be able to reliably manage a wide spectrum of telecommunications and cybersecurity systems.
Over the years, Elektro Celje’s ICT network became highly complex and heavily relied on ethernet technology. This caused numerous challenges in network management and diminished network stability while raising maintenance costs and cybersecurity risks. The company sought a solution that would effectively address these issues with as little disruption to daily operations as possible.
After carefully analyzing available solutions based on technology maturity, functionality, and level of security, Elektro Celje determined the best solution to upgrade its ethernet network was Extreme Networks’ fabric-enabled switches combined with the ExtremeCloud IQ management platform. This allowed the IT team to establish effective control of the network and more easily manage an ever-increasing number of requirements as well as a rapidly growing array of services and applications.
“(Users) do not concern themselves with what is in the background. This means that the communication network is working flawlessly. We, who manage the network, are now able to perform this task significantly easier.”
Challenges
- Overhead costs of the obsolete network equipment growing proportionally to its age.
- Extremely high security and availability requirements due to the critical role of the network.
- Inability to extend network virtualization to the legacy, non-fabric ethernet switches.
- Need for a reliable and standardized solution capable of supporting both IT and OT networks.
Extreme Solutions
- ExtremeCloud IQ - Site Engine
- Extreme Fabric
- Extreme Wired Access
- Extreme Control
Results
- Significantly easier network management and troubleshooting through a unified, centralized management system.
- Substantially lower network operation costs thanks to the optimization and automation of daily routine tasks.
- High availability and cybersecurity at the network architecture level, with the possibility of implementing advanced cybersecurity mechanisms in both business (IT) and process (OT) segments.