The Challenge
Since 2000, Ergon Energy has been ‘keeping the lights on’ for more than 850,000 metered customers, spread across 97% of QLD - many so remote they have absolutely no mobile coverage.
To do so, Ergon Energy maintains a complex network of substations, fibre, high-speed comms network and satellite links.
From 2015, things got even more complicated, as Ergon Energy accelerated deployment of intelligent, street-level devices that are installed on power poles, and which intelligently manage the flow of electricity at a much more granular level.
The introduction of these new devices meant that Ergon Energy’s already large power delivery network was now significantly more complex, so they needed a much more sophisticated environment to make management easier. And naturally, it also raised a swag of new security concerns. They needed to protect against unauthorised control of power delivery and access to data.
In other words, they needed a single, common computing platform that would talk to, understand, secure and control all of their disparate systems - from telecommunications management, SCADA, metering and alarm management software to historian and real-time intelligence solutions.
And because energy utilities are extremely risk adverse, it had to be an on-premise solution.