Energizing Service Delivery Speed and Agility with Private Cloud Automation

REN’s significant domestic and international growth coupled with a drive to further improve performance and quality of service lead to them commissioning two new datacentres in 2018 to host the country’s critical information and telecommunications systems. REN’s original datacentres were siloed, hundreds of kilometers apart, and focused on Disaster Recovery (DR) as the primary use case. Provisioning new applications or VMs took two to three weeks, involved stitching together disconnected technologies, and was both manual and error-prone. In addition, a focus on Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning rather than application architecture, a lack of telemetry and analytics, and the understandable difficulties of knowledge sharing amongst distributed employees and contractors gave the team at REN significant challenges as they tried to position themselves for future growth. Faced with technical debt and legacy processes, REN recognized the possibilities offered by implementing a unified approach to application orchestration and automation. Their new mission was to achieve a single end-to-end workflow with complete visibility to all stakeholders.

Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) is a Portuguese energy sector company holding the concession on the country’s two main infrastructure networks: the National Electricity Transmission Grid and the National Natural Gas Transportation Grid. REN is also responsible for the reception, storage and regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the underground storage and transport of natural gas, and is a public telecommunications service provider. As Portugal’s exclusive Transmission System Operator (TSO) it is responsible for the planning, construction, operation, maintenance, and global management of both these grids and associated infrastructures; serving a population of 10 million people. Furthermore, REN is internationalizing its operations with a growing energy presence in South America.