Securing business-critical processes with AWS Disaster Recovery

Utilities such as EWE bear a central responsibility for providing millions of households and businesses with electricity, gas and IT services. A failure of critical business processes would have serious consequences: the energy and supply security of entire regions would be jeopardised, supply chains and market participants would be unable to fulfil their tasks, and regulatory requirements (KRITIS) would be violated. In electricity trading in particular, a reliable information base and the ability to act must therefore be guaranteed at all times – even in the event of widespread crises or blackouts. The early and reliable restoration of these processes is crucial to enable the company to fulfil its social responsibility and reliably avoid supply gaps.

As part of a preliminary project, EWE Trading identified 18 particularly critical business processes that need to be restored as quickly as possible with up-to-date data in the event of a large-scale power failure. Until now, these processes have been executed centrally in the AWS Frankfurt region. To ensure maximum reliability, EWE planned to provide self-sufficient, grid-independent provisioning in the Dublin region, which places high demands on recovery time and data availability.

In the first step, the adesso team worked with EWE Trading to analyse the individual requirements of business-critical processes and the relevant data sources. Specific recovery targets and tolerable downtimes were defined for each process. Based on these results, adesso developed a tailor-made target architecture for the AWS cloud and implemented the required infrastructure in Dublin as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The existing Kubernetes cluster was completely mirrored, including all technical checks. As the project progressed, the focus was on practical application: realistic emergency scenarios were tested in collaboration with the specialist departments during so-called ‘gamedays’. This allowed the processes to be optimally validated and the entire operations team to be involved in the safe handling of disaster recovery processes.

The solution implemented by adesso ensures that EWE Trading's business-critical processes remain functional at all times, even in the event of a large-scale power failure in continental Europe. Recovery times have been minimised and data loss has been largely eliminated. With the scalable AWS infrastructure in Dublin, EWE now has a future-proof basis on which further processes and expansions can be reliably mapped.

Digital sovereignty offers particular added value: EWE retains full control and independence over its central business processes and data – even in the event of a crisis. The digital infrastructure is designed in such a way that neither external influences nor third-party failures can jeopardise the company's ability to act. In this way, EWE not only meets regulatory requirements, but also creates the basis for sustainable independence and flexibility in the digital age.