Background
REDIMadrid, the academic and research backbone for the Community of Madrid managed by the IMDEA Software Institute, connects 16 universities and research centers and serves more than 290,000 users. As online learning surged during the pandemic, education networks worldwide experienced a dramatic rise in DDoS activity, and academic environments became attractive targets due to low barriers to attack, inherent network openness, and the value of sensitive data. To protect teaching and research continuity for public universities, the Spanish network infrastructure needed a scalable, automated defense that could adapt to evolving attacks while preserving the economic and performance efficiency expected of a leading regional research network.
Solution
To meet these requirements, REDIMadrid decided to turn to Genie Networks to achieve this goal through the help of Axians, their regional ICT solutions partner. REDIMadrid deployed a GenieATM 6000 in its Madrid data center to monitor traffic across universities, research institutes, and innovation centers, covering upstream bandwidth up to 40 Gbit/s. GenieATM’s flow‑intelligent analytics are integrated via API into REDIMadrid’s own dashboard, providing operators with a unified view of live traffic and historical trends. Using GenieATM’s detection engine, normal traffic baselines are learned per university so anomalies can be identified in real time, with automated alerts triggering the appropriate mitigation workflow—including REDIMadrid’s self‑developed mitigation tool, depending on each university’s preference. When incidents occur, administrators can pivot from in‑depth reporting to the Traffic Snapshot feature to examine the event, understand signatures and paths, and confirm that mitigation is scrubbing only the offending flows. The combined deployment delivers automated DDoS detection and response, while preserving operational flexibility and visibility across all connected institutions.
Outcome
With GenieATM, REDIMadrid minimizes downtime from DDoS attacks and safeguards continuity for teaching, research, and campus services. Operators gain comprehensive visibility across the data center and connected academic networks, enabling total control over security posture and informed capacity planning for different network areas, resources, users, and applications. Crucially, these improvements are achieved without compromising capital efficiency or network performance, aligning robust protection with the cost and speed expectations of a modern research and education backbone.
About Axians
Axians is a global brand of VINCI Energies, one of the five largest integrators worldwide with a turnover of 2.6 million euros, more than 12,000 employees and presence in 25 countries. Axians España, with a successful history of more than 30 years, is the undisputed leader in integration services around ICT in Spain. For more information, visit: www.axians.es/en
About REDIMadrid
Formed in 2003, REDIMadrid is a network infrastructure that enables high-speed data exchange between research, university and innovation institutions in the Madrid Regional Government and provides connection with other national and international research networks through RedIRIS. REDIMadrid is an initiative of the Madrid Regional Government and currently the entity responsible for its management and development is the IMDEA Software Institute. For more information, visit: www.redimadrid.es/index_en.html
