Work

Securely supplying the data that keeps the lights on

The Opportunity

Every piece of data is important to someone. But when data sits at the centre of a modern digital economy and helps keep the lights of the nation on, the task of securing that data and publishing it accurately and in real-time becomes a high-stakes endeavour. If this data is to be useful and transformative in mission critical and regulated environments, you have to be confident in its accuracy, trusting in its security and certain in its availability.

Elexon publishes the data that power traders depend on to understand GB market dynamics and make informed trading decisions. This data had long been available through Elexon’s Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service and they wanted scale, strengthen and modernize this platform, reducing the incidence of costly downtime and expanding their offering to include more datasets, richer visualisations and a more flexible API.

As a key piece of national infrastructure, the electricity market sets extremely strict security requirements and data must be secure from tampering or manipulation. Elexon have a legal requirement to publish accurately, reliably and in real time and a platform must be ready to scale up and ingest large amounts of data at any time.

Our approach

Forming a combined team with Elexon’s experts, we sought to understand the business domain and the reasons behind the structure of each dataset. With acquired knowledge of the stringent security requirements of the electricity industry, we focused on the robustness and resilience of the platform from day one, working with in-house and external infosec specialists and validating our approach with independent penetration testing.

Our data engineering team built the pipelines to ingest large volumes of data and ensure it could be reliably output in real time, helping Elexon develop their cloud operating model and paving the way for future cloud deliveries. The loaded data could be displayed in real-time through rich custom graphs and visualisations, with extensive capabilities for filtering and data export (using the Azure API Gateway) to allow users to identify the data which is important to them, and to download it for further analysis.

And additionally, we worked with Elexon’s product team to demonstrate the benefits of agile processes and help them reduce the time taken to get new features to market.

The Impact

Elexon launched the Insights Solution to acclaim from the industry, particularly around ease of use and the quality of the visualisations and API. The data now provided by the Insights Solution now serves as the source of truth for power traders across the country and has withstood attempts from state actors to access and manipulate the data. Our work to showcase agile, cloud-native development best practices has encouraged Elexon to adopt these approaches in other teams.

“Several things really stood out about Softwire. The first was how quickly they picked up the necessary domain knowledge, in a very complex industry. And second is the collaborative culture we’ve fostered, where Softwire and Elexon operate as one team, with everyone taking ownership and contributing to the success. Overall, Softwire has gained a really good reputation within Elexon as a supplier that can deliver successful agile projects in this sector.”

Zaahir Ghanty, Insights Solutions Product Manager, Elexon

“ Softwire quickly picked up the necessary domain knowledge in a very complex industry and gained a really good reputation within Elexon as a supplier that can deliver successful agile projects in this sector.

Zaahir Ghanty, Insights Solutions Product Manager, Elexon

Our Work