New Integrated Security Infrastructure for Portugal’s Leading Provider of Road Services

From the award of its first concession (Norte) in 1999 for the 179 km artery linking the northern
Portugal coast with the mountainous inland region by the Spanish border, Ascendi has grown to become one of Portugal’s leading providers of road infrastructure services and asset management.

The Data Beneath the Road Network

For Ascendi, management of Portugal’s road infrastructure requires careful measurement and processing of multiple inputs such as weather conditions (temperature, wind speed, precipitation), traffic speed and density, vehicle weight, and the state of the road surface—each taken at regular intervals around the entirety of the infrastructure. This real-time data is then integrated with historical data within Ascendi’s innovative SustIMS maintenance management system to enable predictions of infrastructure degradation and inform the decision-making process for resource allocation and investment.

In network terms, these efforts require the interconnection of over 50,000 telematics devices such as sensors, radars, sonars, and cameras, the data from which are carried over a variety of transports including a principal fiber-optic ring, to be processed at a central data center.

In addition to this, the network delivers a wide range of web applications and services, both to the general public via its self-service web portal, and to the company’s 670 staff, 320 of which work in the central operations and management centers, with the rest located at remote offices or on the road.

Similar to many organizations since the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ascendi has also faced a dramatic increase in the number of employees working from home

Security Integrated by Design, Privacy by Default

For Ascendi’s IT team, this unique set of requirements presented a number of
challenges; one of the biggest was how to properly and efficiently protect all the myriad moving parts that comprise the critical data network underpinning the business.

Having concluded that their existing perimeter firewall was no longer sufficient, Ascendi started to look for a broader, more all-encompassing solution in which networking, security, and data privacy would be an inherent part of each infrastructure component,
rather than something separate to be applied as an afterthought.

The new solution would have to cover every part of the infrastructure, which
would equate to protecting the entire attack surface where all possible
interactions between its users, systems, and devices take place. This meant
securing everything from client devices to email systems, web and application
delivery servers, and the switches that interconnect them all.

Most importantly, they would need a solution in which all constituent parts could act in unison in accordance with common centrally defined security policies. Instead of creating yet more separate pockets of specialized security functions, each tasked with
protecting individual data flows, Ascendi wanted seamless protection that would
encompass their entire infrastructure today while intelligently adapting to the
needs of tomorrow.