Endian Technology Helps to Support Hera Group to Provide Utilities & Services

Hera is now among the nation’s largest multi-utilities, born in 2002 out of the aggregation of 11 municipal companies operating in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The first corporation of its kind nationwide, Hera worsks mainly in the environment (waste management), water (aquaduct, sewage and purification) and energy (electricity, gas distribution and sales, energy services) sectors. Other services offered include public lighting and telecommunications. Its range of activities undergoes continuous and constant development, and meet the needs of 4.4 million citizens in over 350 municipalities in Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Marche, Tuscany and Veneto. 

Right at the technological heart of HERA is HERAtech, the company that manages the work requested by customers for all network services managed by the Hera Group and also handles the design and construction of plants and networks in addition to highly specialised technical activities, such as plant remote control, the technical call centre that manages Emergency Services and the Analysis Laboratories for drinking water, wastewater and waste.

The project by Endian for Hera is developed in cooperation with the Fluids Remote Control Division and its main goals are to fully manage the suppliers’ access to plants and devices, and to punctually monitor the network distributed over the regions covered by the service. Control activity takes action in multiple data centers, the places where all critical infrastructure is housed, and it’s all about authorizing access to suppliers and scanning all connections to detect any possible unauthorized devices or intrusions. 

Endian project equipment consists of industrial gateways 4i Edge 313 and 515, installed in the data centers of the 9 districts for network monitoring, each of them connected with the central Endian Switchboard platform. On this core dashboard a geographic map shows all the centers and counter tools which, while listing all connected IPs or Mac Addresses, can also scan and check those that are irregular or not authorized.

Official suppliers are also authorized to reach plants and machinery via VPN using Endian Connect App and, according to the gateway or the managed plant, they receive granular permissions to access specific hosts. All of this is easy to set-up centrally, using the user-based permissions available on Switchboard platform.

First results are highly positive for the team of Fluids Remote Control unit, who states their satisfaction as follows: “Endian technology supports our strategies to improve network monitoring. The PoC kit was an excellent turnkey solution to manage all access permissions to the devices connected into the LAN of our plants, fully integrated with our corporate policies”. 

Among the features most appreciated by HERAtech is the central system for network traffic monitoring. While it’s important that data center resources are remotely reached by external collaborators for daily operations, the equipment is critical and access to it must be safeguarded. Thanks to Endian solution HeraTech can spot any unauthorized presence in real time: remote connection is enabled for verified profiles while keeping the whole environment controlled and secure.