Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) enables efficient trading for 6000+ participants with Sectona

Case Study | 2 min. read

About IEX

Industry Electric Utility

Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) is India’s first and largest energy trading exchange established in 2008 with its headquarters in New Delhi. It provides nationwide automated trading platform for physical delivery of electricity, renewable energy certificates and energy saving certificates. It enables efficient price and counter-party risk management for customers from the electricity market as well as the open access industries. They have an active registration of over 6500 participants, who are leveraging IEX’s platform to manage their power post in a competitive and reliable way. The Exchange is publicly listed on the NSE and BSE.

Challenge

Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) is approved and regulated by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission. With multiple product posts under its umbrella, the exchange is driven by a commitment to enable efficient trading execution for its increasing participants. The IT team of the Exchange has ensured adoption of start-of-the-art systems and technology to establish transparent and efficient energy marketplaces for delivering affordable, reliable energy to consumers. To uphold this mission, the Exchange needs a modern and secure approach to administrative user access management that would help them establish security best practices.

Leveraging custom trading applications and critical network device applications are part of routine tasks for IT teams. Exposing such applications to external risk vectors can cause serious damages to the business. Conforming to the norms of access security, ensuring administrative credentials to such applications are not exposed and shared among multiple IT staff is of paramount importance. This is what led them to look for a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution.

Identifying the gap, the team summarized three key objectives from PAM:

Flexible framework for integrating with their in-house custom applications for securing access and monitoring user activities
Secure vault for providing password-less access to applications and storing credentials in a central encrypted repository
Scalable model to extending the access security and monitoring framework to a wide mix of IT assets, including networking devices

Solution

IEX found all three objectives being achieved with Sectona. Sectona’s Privileged Access Management Suite provides an automated and robust solution that provides the Exchange with secure access to users across the IT infrastructure including network devices and custom applications. The solution has built-in framework that helps scale and extend the security framework to a wide variety of in-house or third-party applications on demand. With a robust built-in vault, the Exchange further safeguards critical passwords and helps minimize downtime. Furthermore, the solution provides increased visibility and governance over user activities with comprehensive logs, reports and threat intel.

Specific objectives met include:

Password-Less access to third party applications such as Checkpoint Smart Dashboard
Enhanced security and built-in replication with an embedded, unexposed and encrypted vault
Framework for seamless integration with In-house custom applications for secure access and monitoring
Comprehensive user session logs for forensics and audit