Over a thousand sites - power stations, cabins, offices - connected to each other on the cloud on several continents. It is the result of Beyond cloud computing the project that Enel developed with Accenture, Cisco and Sirti Digital solutions. The group announces it after the fact, presenting it as "one of the largest enterprise telecommunications network virtualization projects in the world”, a project capable of giving a strong acceleration to the overall digitization of Enel in the world. At present, the operation has involved North and South America and Europe, intervening in over 10 countries (Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Russia and some sites in North America).
It should be remembered that the digitization of the network and of corporate management processes is one of the pillars on which Enel's development plans announced with the latest and with the previous business plan are based. From the point of view of complexity and costs, the press release released by the group specifies that “the basis of the project is a streamlined virtual infrastructure that uses public ones as well as private networks. A solution considered difficult to implement until recently, due to the reluctance of companies to use public connectivity, now outdated with the adoption of a dedicated, secure, virtual network with quality of service and reduced costs precisely because it was created by integrating public and private infrastructure”. And it represents “a first step towardsEdge Computing, which will allow the reduction of latency of information processing with an increase in the processing capacity distributed throughout the territory".
From the project carried out in recent years, Enel expects to significantly reduce go-to-market times, optimize management costs, reduce operating costs” also with remote maintenance interventions. The other opportunities concern the integration with the Internet of Things and augmented and virtual reality to facilitate "the control, management and maintenance of one's assets distributed throughout the territory".
“The Beyond Cloud Computing Project - he claims Charles Bozzoli, Global Digital Solutions Director of Enel – is part of the digital transformation program launched in 2015 with the migration to the Cloud. During the Covid-19 emergency, the virtualization of network equipment allowed us to manage the infrastructure remotely without the need to have personnel on site."
A first test on the potential of digitization underway took place during the Covid emergency period when, in a very short time, the group allowed remote work to over 37.000 employees who had access to company applications and collaborate in safety .
