The story

Lukene Berrosteguieta, Head of Security Operations, is responsible for Repsol's network security, digital identity, and incident response. Lukene shares her experience in developing and maintaining a secure, reliable, and available network for Repsol, with the help of Cisco Services, to support the company's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Repsol is a global multi-energy company that provides critical energy services to homes and businesses. Our business needs to be always on; downtime of our network is not an option. Our network's security is vital for daily operations and plays a crucial role in Repsol's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Because of this, security is critical to preventing downtime and maintaining these essential services for our customers. 

Unfortunately, energy companies are a primary target for cyberattacks and Repsol is no exception. These cyberattacks can be catastrophic, severely disrupting normal operations with outages and causing ripple effects to other industries. Outages can impact normal operations of our customers' homes and businesses and can affect everything from daily transportation to the shipping and delivery of goods.

My top priority as the leader of security operations is protecting Repsol from those cyberattacks. Our team is the most important line of defense in proactively identifying security threats and protecting the company from those threats.

But it can be complicated to maintain network security in a company our size. We have 25,000 workstations, 11,000 cell phones, and 6000 servers worldwide. In addition, we need to ensure data security, on-premises and in the cloud, secure existing cloud workloads, and support additional cloud migrations. We are also in the midst of a major digital transformation, which requires us to apply new updates to cover new vulnerabilities every day.

Through close collaboration with the Cisco Services team, we've continuously improved our overall network security. This has allowed us to support the digital transformation journey so that our business, and our customers, can count on reliable service.

A strong, secure network from the ground up

A strong network requires a solid foundation, with security built into the system from the beginning. When we are implementing a new product, the Cisco Services team works with us on the analysis, design, deployment, and evolution of the product throughout the entire lifecycle. They know the infrastructure and the best practices to ensure our success.

With the support of the Cisco Services team, we can deploy faster and remediate security incidents more quickly. The team is also supporting us in network segmentation which will provide an additional layer of security.

Leveraging automation for greater visibility into threats

We address around 500 email or fraud security incidents in an average month, but overall, we get millions of security threats a month. To manage this incremental number of threats, we moved from reacting to security incidents to being more proactive. We reduced our attack surface by mitigating lateral movement risks with Cisco Secure Workload. We also achieved a deeper visibility into network and workload security policies. Leveraging Cisco Secure Workload machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, we are able to detect, analyze, and respond to abnormal application activities with no human intervention.

However, in some cases, the security threats must be addressed manually, and having visibility into the whole network is crucial to react quickly and effectively. Thanks to the guidance shared by Cisco Services, the visibility of our network has increased by 40 percent, and we can take more preventative and proactive actions to eliminate costly outages.

As a result, we've already seen a 10 percent reduction in the time to remediate an incident. In addition, we are continuously improving network monitoring and are working to enhance automation further to support the digital transformation effort.

Securing our hybrid work environment

Security has always been a high priority with our extensive and intricate network but was even more critical once the pandemic began. When employees had to work remotely, it was even more important they could access the network safely for us to form a secure hybrid work infrastructure. 

We have continuously innovated to design, develop, and deploy our network to keep it secure, robust, resilient, and flexible in delivering the required services. Cisco Services has supported our efforts every step of the way to enhance and maintain network security across our entire infrastructure to ensure the safety of our customers and workers. We now have a secure, healthy foundation to continue on our path of environmental responsibility and meet our customers' energy needs.

Network security of the future, for the future

We will always need to proactively detect and remediate new and evolving network security threats. Using Cisco Secure Firewall and working with the Cisco Services team, we will continue to build barriers to prevent security breaches, automate to manage the millions of threats, and collect data to be proactive in keeping our company and its mission safe. When a threat arises, we can adapt–we have the systems, the solutions, and the people. We can see the future together.