AGRINTESA

The Digital Revolution of Agrintesa

In the age of digital transformation, the specialists at VEM sistemi guided Italy’s leading agricultural cooperative through a journey of upgrading its technological infrastructure and restructuring its corporate security system.

With a leading role in the European agri-food market, Agrintesa, founded in 2007 from the merger of historic agricultural cooperatives in the Emilia-Romagna region, is a cooperative that today counts 4,000 member farms. Since its founding, it has consistently increased its productivity, now exceeding 440,000 tons of products delivered annually by its members and generating revenues of over €360 million. This economic and production growth, combined with a careful reflection on the state of cybersecurity, led Agrintesa’s IT team to assess the need for changes in infrastructure procedures to align technologies with production growth, alongside a restructuring of the company’s security framework.

“The strong growth of the cooperative in recent years, along with several acquisitions, resulted in Agrintesa having a social structure under a single brand but fragmented in terms of technological infrastructure, without fully standardized workflows across the various business units,” explains Alessandro Collina, CIO of the Agrintesa Group, who continues:
“A complete review of the ERP system was therefore necessary to centralize and standardize management operations, aiming for a gradual unification of procedures across the plants and the centralization of certain control and management structures.
This revision, however, had to be supported by a major intervention in the network infrastructure, especially since the new ERP is cloud-hosted. Furthermore, reinvesting in cybersecurity became a priority due to the sudden shift in the cyber threat landscape, which has become increasingly aggressive, and the realization that our security systems were at risk of no longer being sufficient to counter modern threats.”

To enable Agrintesa to successfully follow the path of change envisioned by the IT team, a careful scouting process among available market players led to the selection of VEM sistemi for its experience and expertise. The system integrator supported Agrintesa through a true digital revolution, starting with the redesign of the technology infrastructure at its main plant in Faenza, a large and complex campus where the existing network, partially covered by wireless, needed to be extended and made more efficient.

Starting from an assessment conducted by VEM Sistemi engineers on the existing infrastructure, a transformation began that revolutionized Agrintesa’s technological setup with new, high-performing solutions. These improved network transport capacity and enhanced resilience in the event of incidents. The Wi-Fi network was extended to all necessary areas, based on a survey conducted prior to the start of the work. Considering the specifics of the Faenza plant, a Cisco solution was chosen for both LAN and Wi-Fi, along with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) for authentication:
ISE is the core where policy decisions are made, bringing together infrastructure intelligence to authenticate users and endpoints while automatically containing threats.
The Cisco-based solution enabled easier VLAN management within the network, and also ensured effective, widely tested methods to prevent potential loops or malfunctions — issues raised by Agrintesa during the assessment phase.

This was a challenging process, especially regarding the supply of technology components during a period of geopolitical instability that made procurement difficult and extended timelines. In this context, Agrintesa recognized an added value in VEM’s ability to work in a scalable way to meet critical deadlines, successfully completing the technology upgrades at the Faenza offices before the launch of the new ERP system, scheduled for May 1, 2023.

As a final step in the project, Agrintesa chose to use VEM sistemi’s Network Operation Center (NOC) and Security Operation Center (SOC) services to manage infrastructure and access highly specialized support. It also adopted Myvem, the Cloud-as-a-Service platform for monitoring and managing the technological complexity of ICT, Facility, Data Center, and IoT infrastructures.

From a cybersecurity enforcement perspective, Agrintesa selected Certego, a company specialized in cyber threat intelligence and cybercrime defense. Certego operates using the PanOptikon® Unified Security Operations platform and provides 24/7/365 Managed Detection & Response (MDR) services, including the following modules:

– Certego Network Sensor deployed on Agrintesa’s network for traffic analysis and monitoring;

– Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) Agent for pre-authorized automated containment actions (process banning, host isolation) on endpoints where the EDR agent is installed, based on predefined threat detection rules developed with Agrintesa during the service startup;

– Firewall Tactical Response for automatic enforcement of IP and domain blocking rules on firewalls, ensuring fast containment actions against active threats;

– Dark and Deep Web Monitoring module for detecting and recovering stolen credentials and confidential customer information.

All of this is aimed at relieving the IT department from the burdens of cybersecurity management, allowing it to focus more effectively on business needs.

“There were no anomalies during the transition. This first phase of change went very well. We managed to continue operations according to our improvement goals while maintaining and even increasing security activities,” says Alessandro Collina, CIO of the Agrintesa Group, who adds:
“We achieved the stability we were looking for compared to our previous assets. We extended and made Wi-Fi coverage in the production area more reliable, and reports of malfunctions have dropped significantly. For us, these are all signs of a successful result and a positive transformation.”

Thanks to this investment — which also involved commercial partners Alegra and Valfrutta Fresco, as well as affiliated company Brio — the Group now relies on a technological structure better suited to business growth and a restructured security system designed to better face and prevent today’s cyber threats.
This is just the first step, which has already delivered very positive results and will soon lead to the redesign of the network infrastructure across all the cooperative’s facilities.