CSEA Uses Radware to Safeguard Its Digital Assets and Ensure 100% Business Continuity for Its Customers

CSEA, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance and the Italian Energy and Water Authority, plays a critical role in regulating the Italian energy sector. It collects funds from utility suppliers and distributors and reallocates these funds to electric, gas, and water sectors. Due to the critical nature of these services, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customer-facing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, including in the face of a cyber-attack. The IT department at CSEA had relied on the native security capabilities of individual servers, resulting in a manual, resource-intensive process that made it difficult to implement infrastructure-wide security updates and policies. 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 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 subsidized 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.