Uniper ties a complex data estate together with Azure Arc

As an international energy company, Uniper faces the challenges wrought by a constantly changing industry. It’s pushing decarbonization forward both for itself and its customers. Today with Fortum, its main shareholder, Uniper is the third-largest producer of CO2-free energy in Europe. Honoring that ambition while keeping up with accelerating energy industry advances is hard enough; Uniper also needs to simplify data governance and management as much as possible to retain agility. Apart from its headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany, Uniper operates in more than 40 countries, complying with varying data sovereignty regulations—GDPR and the German BDSG law (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz), for example. Some of its data is classified as “black,” meaning that it cannot leave the originating country. This dictates maintaining some on-premises datacenters. This hybrid environment could complicate IT management, but Uniper keeps its large estate manageable and boosts security with Microsoft Azure Arc, now invaluable to Uniper’s overall IT strategy. 

Working to track a complex data estate

Uniper IT teams manage an IT landscape that poses challenges on every level. While maintaining on-premises datacenters as required, the company has migrated workloads to the cloud wherever possible to maximize agility, cost control, and security. Tamás Stolcz, Cloud Architect Lead at Uniper, explains, “The cloud affords us the flexible platform we need to cope with constant change. It also makes it easier for us to isolate applications belonging to any given subsidiary and apportion access as needed.” 

Maintaining a mix of cloud and on-premises environments across so many national borders is intricate in itself. The historical silos inherent to a growing international company added to the complexity, creating duplicated effort. And no matter how hard the IT team worked, there was the persistent fear that a little-used server or solution might not be accounted for and cause management issues in the future. “We knew from the exercise of closing down some of our datacenters that it wasn’t possible to know about every server and application,” Stolcz points out. 

The barrier to full visibility was no mystery to the team. “Every datacenter had been managed by local managed service providers using different tool sets, which further complicated getting the insights we needed for effective management,” explains Stolcz. “We’d looked for a cloud brokerage tool for a long time. Our main driver in implementing Azure Arc was to create a single, unified view of our estate. It’s a very effective tool for standardizing management and providing visibility that we’ve never had before.”

Starting with a multi-capable vendor for multifaceted advantages 

Uniper began in 2016 as a spin-off of E.ON, another German electric utility. Its recent start as a new company gave Uniper the opportunity to base its systems, going forward, on a single vendor chosen deliberately for the capabilities it could offer a company with complex IT needs. “Microsoft offers a single cloud provider strategy,” says Stolcz. “From time to time, we’ve evaluated other competitors, but the advantages of Microsoft services always outweigh the effort needed to onboard and run a solution from another provider. That’s why when we need a solution, we always start with Microsoft offerings. And our local Microsoft customer success team not only supports us very well; they keep us informed about new developments to help us stay on the leading edge.” He adds that another cloud provider would have also added additional formats into the mix, complicating the use of a single cloud brokerage tool. “With Azure and Azure Arc, we have the same data structure for all of our information, no matter where it resides,” he adds. 

Building IT systems for the nascent company, the small Uniper IT team migrated from the existing parent company’s Azure estate. It created the new estate as a greenfield system (independent of previous systems) for the new Azure environment while also maintaining existing on-premises systems. Uniper elected to use a managed service provider (MSP) to take over day-to-day maintenance of its datacenters, freeing the internal IT team for strategic work. “Azure Arc is part of our managed service,” says Stolcz. “We agreed with our MSP not to change policies in Azure Arc, but we have full visibility into everything.”

The team especially values Azure Monitor VM insights, which provides a visual map of the connections between servers in Azure Arc. “The resource map in Azure Arc gives us a great view of the dependencies between servers,” says Stolcz. “That’s a capability we’ve been seeking for a long time because previously when we moved workloads, we couldn’t tell if all the firewall changes had been made in coordination with the move.”

By the end of 2021, Uniper expects to have onboarded about 500 virtual machines to Azure Arc. Based on hosting type, Stolcz and his colleagues move the data in stages, beginning with the migration from a managed private cloud. The team’s experience with Azure solutions overall, especially Azure Arc, hastens deployment. “Our team was surprised at the quantity and quality of metrics we get from Azure Arc,” Stolcz says. “They were also effective faster because of its similarities with other Azure solutions they use, and the documentation is perfectly straightforward.”

Securing a complex estate with Azure Arc

Like many companies that manage complex hybrid estates with a combined team of internal IT professionals and an MSP, Uniper depends on Azure Arc as a consistent management tool that spans multi-cloud and on-premises environments, translating to heightened security. Uniper uses Azure security solutions, notably Azure Monitor to collect monitoring telemetry for Azure Security Center. “We get invaluable security recommendations from Azure Security Center,” says Stolcz. “With external and internal teams to manage, it’s very helpful to see things like whether certain servers haven’t been patched, for example. We’re able to be proactive because this information is quickly surfaced.” The company also uses Defender for Cloud for servers and Defender for Endpoint, relying on endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities for near real-time, advanced attack detections for its on-premises deployments. As its Azure Arc usage evolves, Uniper can look forward to using the platform to project its on-premises resources into Azure Resource Manager for further efficiency gains. 

Uniper also uses Azure Advisor for usage telemetry and configuration recommendations. It uses a variety of Azure data storage and analytics solutions, too—Azure Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for Kubernetes clusters, plus Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB. The Uniper Applications department uses Resource Manager templates to simplify configuration and optimize efficiency with repeatable infrastructure deployment. The department also uses Azure DevOps to collaborate on code creation and testing. 

Continuing into the future with Azure solutions

Stolcz looks forward to ongoing gains for both his team and the company. Uniper depends on stellar information technologies and the most efficient management of those assets. “Automation is key to keeping our IT department from mushrooming in size,” says Stolcz. “Automations available through Azure offer the efficiency we need to maintain a uniform team, and Azure Arc can build on that automation and extend it throughout the estate.” Hinesh Pankhania, Head of Hosting and Cloud Technologies at Uniper, is just as enthusiastic. “Azure Arc has really transformed the way we look at all of our hosting environments,” he says. “Now with Azure Arc we have greater transparency of all of our edge/data rooms and datacenters. That enhances governance and simplifies management; the same team that manages all of our other Microsoft Azure workloads also easily supports Azure Arc. “

Uniper is now embarking on deploying AI for IT operations. This fusion of AI for cloud-based management and DevOps aims to counteract the challenge of increasingly complex and changeable estates. AI for IT operations blends automated monitoring and correction into those complex estates, taking care of routine tasks to free analysts for more complex problem solving. The IT team is testing possible use cases that would connect Azure Arc with AI for IT operations. For Stolcz, it’s the logical next step. “We value the consistency that heightens efficiency and security in our Azure solutions,” he says. “And the unified management we get with Azure Arc is vital.”

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