The story

Santiago Maestro, Technical Services Manager at Repsol, is responsible for digitalizing the multi-energy company's intricate network infrastructure and workplace services. Santiago shares his experience working with Cisco Services to migrate to the cloud and evolve the network.

Customers are our top priority at Repsol, a global multi-energy company. We have over one million customers and a presence in 30 countries. Our services must be available 100 percent of the time; downtime is not an option. We are now embarking on our most exciting initiative: to be the first energy company to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. 

To achieve this, we needed to evolve our business model and, ultimately, transform the company. Digital transformation is a crucial component of our overall initiative to deliver our services more efficiently, in an agile manner. Our IT team is at the forefront of this digital transformation effort as we improve the way we deliver services.

Our vast and intricate network must be reliable to support our entire infrastructure, from the solar park and wind energy farms to synthetic fuel production, the oil rigs, fuel stations, and households we serve. If the network fails, everything else fails too. 

Our goal to become a net-zero emissions company goes hand in hand with providing the best possible experience for our customers. We intentionally take action to preserve and protect our planet for future generations. As such, we identified three critical pillars for success with our digital transformation initiative:

1.  Migrate to the cloud
2.  Evolve the network
3. Renew the headquarters' network and infrastructure and transform it into a software-defined network 

The Cisco Services team has supported us at every step of our transformation journey to ensure success.

Pillar 1: Migrating to the cloud for flexibility and efficiencies

The first critical step in our digital transformation was moving our infrastructure from an on-premises model to the cloud to provide more flexibility and improve efficiencies. This was extremely challenging since we support a multitude of applications and services for the business. This migration needed to happen without any service disruptions.   

The Cisco Services team helped migrate our servers to Azure quickly and securely with few incidents. The team also helped develop robust, proactive intervention strategies and quick, practical solutions. One such solution is Cisco Secure Workload, which has been vital in preparing and executing the migration to the cloud and securing access to the workloads once in the cloud.

Migration with no outages was especially critical during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our employees were working from remote locations and needed to access our network from anywhere and any device to do their jobs. In addition, Repsol's services were even more important to our customers during the pandemic, when they relied on us to provide fuel for emergency vehicles and power their homes during quarantines and support systems crucial for health and safety.

We've migrated nearly 65 percent of our infrastructure to the cloud so far. The best practices and assistance provided by the Cisco CX team had a huge impact on increasing security and ensuring the success of the process. Now we can deliver services to our customers and the business faster, and more efficiently. The migration would have been far more difficult without the Cisco Services team's talent, expertise, and guidance.

Pillar 2: Evolving the network with digitalization and automation

A centralized network worked well with our previous on-premises model, but since migrating to the cloud, we're consuming software as a service (SaaS) as well as infrastructure from the cloud.    

Our network needed to evolve to support this new consumption model. A critical part of the network evolution was changing how we operate our network through digitalization and automation. The Cisco Services team has supported us in achieving our network evolution goals and optimizing the features of Cisco solutions to create a stable, agile, and secure network.

We've launched hundreds of digital initiatives to be more efficient, secure, and agile. And with the help of the Cisco Services team, we've experienced minimal service disruptions. We even kicked off an SD-WAN deployment so the network can adapt to the workloads consumed by our users.

Once we digitalized vital processes, we automated them. Previously, we spent a great deal of time on manual and repetitive tasks such as configuring our network and setting asset control or bandwidth. With these automated tasks, our IT team can add value to our business by drastically reducing mundane tasks, focusing on more strategic activities, and further evolving the network. Quite simply, automation allows us to pay attention to what matters—providing value faster. 

Additionally, we implemented Cisco Catalyst Center to increase efficiencies by automating network management. Now we can proactively detect errors in workloads through the Cisco Secure Workload (formerly Tetration) platform, which gives us better visibility. We can also detect and correct errors before they cause a service disruption. This improved visibility and proactive prevention of service outages save our users time and money. 

When our employees were required to work from home during the pandemic, bandwidth consumption increased 5x as people consumed services from various devices. The robust and reliable network that we put in place could adapt to this increase in demand with no issues. 

Pillar 3: Renewing the headquarters' network and infrastructure 

Our next step will be to focus on the network and infrastructure in our headquarters, where we provide services for around 3000 users every day. Our goal is to transform the network into a programmable software-defined network (SDN) model that facilitates management and troubleshooting and provides agility, flexibility, and scalability to implement new infrastructure services.

We will be starting this project soon and, with the guidance of Cisco CX, we are confident that Cisco SD-Access and the integration with Cisco SD-WAN will allow us to achieve those goals.

A partnership to fuel the future

We built the Cisco CX and Repsol relationship on trust and collaboration. The Cisco Services team provides essential best practice guidance and proactively shares insights on new product functionalities we can leverage to improve the network continuously.

At a high level, the CX team helps us set our ongoing strategy, but they are also there to help us in the day-to-day operations. Every time we need to design or make a change in the network, the CX team is there to assist. Their guidance has saved us countless hours determining the approach and executing on it, greatly improving our productivity.

With the support of Cisco CX, we know we are getting the most value from the Cisco products we rely on to operate our business. With Cisco CX, our digital transformation journey is less complex, quicker, and has fewer incidents or issues detrimental to the customer experience. 

I know we have the means to achieve success on our journey; we have the right tools and people—the Repsol team and the Cisco team, working together. That's why I'm optimistic about the future, and I'm sure we will achieve all of our goals. Most importantly, embarking on our most exciting initiative: achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and being the first energy company to do so.