enechain, Inc.

• Professional Services

enechain, Inc. is a startup that operates an energy marketplace.As a leader in transforming the energy industry, the company faced the challenge of inconsistent incident response quality across development teams as the number of products increased. To address this, the company implemented SIGQ’s incident response support service. By empowering all teams to become self-sufficient, the company successfully raised the overall level of incident response capability and strengthened reliability by establishing a culture of product monitoring.

■Challenges Before Implementation

• While the number of products was increasing, there were inconsistencies in the quality of incident response across development teams

• Knowledge and expertise regarding incident response were dependent on individual staff members and had not been standardized across the organization 

• To further grow the business, we needed to strengthen the reliability of our products in areas such as security and incident response

■Benefits of Implementation

• Establish a culture of product monitoring throughout the organization and build a foundation for continuous improvement in reliability

• By empowering all development teams, our incident response capabilities have been improved to a level that provides company-wide peace of mind.

• We also provide insights to help improve security standards and contribute to business expansion driven by reliability

As our product has grown rapidly, the quality of our incident response has become inconsistent.

enechain, Inc. is a startup founded in 2019 with the mission of “Building Energy Markets, Coloring Our Society.” As the operator of one of Japan’s largest energy marketplaces, the company offers a range of products, including eSquare Live and eCompass, to drive digital transformation in the energy industry.

Yusuke Sudo, the company’s CTO, describes the key features of the enechain business as follows.

"What makes our business so exciting is the challenge of building a system that supports the social infrastructure of the power grid—all while operating as a startup. In the world of electricity trading, the 2016 deregulation of the power market has sparked a constant stream of proposals for regulatory changes. However, few companies have the system development infrastructure in place to respond quickly to such requests. That is precisely why we can leverage the speed unique to a startup and our development style, which utilizes new technologies, as our strengths."

At enechain, we have built a technology stack based on Google Cloud, with a focus on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Systems that support critical social infrastructure require a high level of reliability, including robust security and consistent service levels. To meet these demands, we have adopted GKE for its scalability—which can accommodate business growth—and its ability to support cross-team management, enabling us to implement unified governance and platform engineering.

As the business grew and we began rolling out multiple products, one challenge that emerged was inconsistency in the quality of incident response across development teams. Specifically, Mr. Sudo recalls feeling concerned that the methods for detecting outages and the speed of incident response varied from product to product.

“Products that support social infrastructure must be highly reliable. We felt it was necessary to improve our incident response capabilities across all our products,” said Mr. Sudo.

There are several factors underlying this challenge. In the early stages of product development, priority is often given to developing new features, while efforts to improve reliability tend to be put on the back burner.Another reason was that incident response awareness and know-how were often dependent on individual engineers, making them susceptible to variations based on personal experience. To address this situation, SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is essential—a methodology and role focused on improving service reliability through operations design based on software engineering, as well as continuous measurement, automation, and improvement.

However, Mr. Sudo also points out the challenges of implementing SRE. SRE requires operational experience with products of a certain scale, as well as expertise in both applications and infrastructure. Furthermore, simply applying textbook SRE knowledge won’t work; it’s necessary to adapt flexibly to the organization, the business, and the current phase of the product. According to Mr. Sudo, the number of people with these advanced skills is quite limited.

The Key Is a "See It Through" Attitude: SRE Self-Management Support Involving All Teams

With the aim of addressing these challenges, enechain implemented SIGQ’s incident response support service in May 2025. Mr. Sudo says that the deciding factors for the implementation were SIGQ’s expertise in SRE for startups and large-scale web services, as well as the clarity of the service’s features and the value it delivers.

“Based on past experience, we’ve learned that when outsourcing SRE work, simply adding more staff without clearly defining expectations often fails to deliver the desired results. In contrast, SIGQ analyzed our current areas for improvement and provided us with a roadmap in advance that clearly outlined what needed to be ‘fully implemented’ within the agreed timeframe. This made it much easier to align our expectations regarding the deliverables. Given that there are very few professionals who can effectively combine technical expertise with management skills, we had high hopes for them in this regard,” said Mr. Sudo.

SIGQ provided the following support. First, based on an analysis of the current state and a roadmap for improvement, we established a framework for OKRs and regular reporting. Building on that, SIGQ members joined each development team as SREs and provided ongoing support until each team was able to operate independently.Specific initiatives included building and improving a monitoring infrastructure using Datadog, establishing operational and monitoring systems—including the optimization of alert configurations—and developing and rolling out incident response procedures company-wide. Additionally, leveraging its experience in obtaining a SOC 2 Type 1 assurance report, SIGQ provided insights on internal controls and security.

We placed particular emphasis on improving incident response capabilities and enabling our teams.We held weekly meetings with all development teams, working alongside team members to drive progress toward our goals. Additionally, while securing approval from stakeholders, we established rules, policies, and documentation and ensured they became firmly embedded within the teams. Regarding these SIGQ initiatives, Mr. Sudo praised them highly, stating, “They enabled us to implement a comprehensive set of transformation initiatives without any oversights, while simultaneously reducing our management workload.”

“Since I was also a leader on some product development teams, I was in a position to help enable them. Once the reliability metrics were clearly defined, we were able to thoroughly check for any signs of incidents, and I witnessed firsthand how the team began to operate independently,” said Mr. Sudo.

Establishing a Product Monitoring Culture: Laying the Groundwork for Enhanced Reliability and Growth

One of the concrete results achieved with SIGQ’s support was a significant reduction in the number of alerts. When building infrastructure using IaC, the same configuration settings are propagated directly across multiple environments. Consequently, if there is an error in the alert configuration, it affects the entire system and generates a large amount of noise. In particular, alert configurations tend to be left untouched once they are set up. By reviewing the upstream configurations, we succeeded in reducing the number of alerts to one-tenth of the original volume.With the reduction in noise, we were able to focus on alerts that truly required attention, leading to a significant improvement in the quality of incident response.

Mr. Sudo emphasizes that the greatest achievement resulting from SIGQ’s support—more than any quantitative improvements— is “the establishment of a culture of product monitoring within the organization.” What was once a inconsistent approach to incident response across teams has been standardized, and a high standard of response—where the entire organization “reacts immediately and resolves issues when errors occur”—has become firmly established.By not letting any team slip up and maintaining consistent standards across the entire company, a habit of constantly monitoring the product and taking responsibility for its reliability has been established.

“In B2B business, where traffic is lower than in B2C, it’s easy to overlook minor errors. However, if we want to scale our business in the future, we absolutely cannot neglect product reliability. With an eye toward future growth, strengthening our organizational culture to prioritize reliability at this stage is a major advantage,” said Mr. Sudo.

Leveraging our reliability, we are poised to take a major leap forward as a key part of social infrastructure

Regarding the company’s future outlook, Mr. Sudo stated that while promoting the use of new products such as eSquare Live, the company aims to integrate multiple products to provide seamless and optimal solutions for customers. He added that, as products supporting social infrastructure, they are required to meet increasingly stringent security and availability requirements. To this end, the company is considering initiatives to further enhance reliability, such as obtaining third-party certification from international organizations.

“As the damage caused by ransomware and other threats becomes increasingly severe, our customers are paying closer attention to security measures than ever before. Investing in security is important not only for defense but also as a proactive tool to give customers peace of mind and enhance the value of our products. We have high hopes for SIGQ’s advanced security expertise,” said Mr. Sudo.

In closing, Mr. Sudo offers the following advice to companies facing similar challenges:
“SRE is a highly challenging field, and deriving the optimal solution for each individual company requires a certain level of experience and execution capability. Sometimes, rather than trying to figure things out through trial and error on your own, implementing a solution backed by strong execution capabilities—such as SIGQ—will ultimately lead to the fastest implementation of SRE and enable your team to operate independently,” said Mr. Sudo.

enechain is working to transform the energy industry. SIGQ will continue to support the company’s efforts through initiatives aimed at enhancing reliability.