Energy and Utilities

Energy & Utilities

Energy and Utilities

Energy: The Industry that Fuels the Global Economic Engine

There is a strong common interest around the globe in ensuring the world can produce and use energy at reasonable costs and in a sustainable way to ensure the quality of life of the world's population. To achieve these objectives the energy industry is focused on three key pillars: energy efficiency, diversification of energy supplies, and dealing with volatility. At the same time the industry faces numerous security challenges including intrusions by hackers, terrorists, and organized crime. Even more pressing are the continual challenges in managing and complying with the wide and expanding body of laws and regulations including compliance with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protections (CIP's) and the Federal Cybersecurity Act.

Energy is one of the most critical and strategic industries in the global economy. In many industrialized countries more than one third of energy is used for industrial purposes. In the US most of the energy used for industrial purposes is supplied from natural gas and petroleum, with electricity coming in a distant third, followed closely by coal. Energy has always been critical to keeping militaries moving - whether as feed in a horse's stomach, coal used for transporting troops by rail to the war front, or synthetic fuels keeping the air force flying. On the other side of the scale billions of people rely on the electric grid and even short disruptions can have significant impact on day-to-day living.

Two of the most critical parts of energy related systems are the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Distributed Control System (DCS). Historically these control systems were closed and used private networks for communication between devices. Today new control systems increasingly rely on open, public networks for communication. These new communication channels create significant opportunities for improvements in efficiency but also create opportunities for exploitation. Hackers are a constant threat and could potentially cause serious damage to systems that feed the power grid. In the worst-case scenario, terrorists could engineer an attack that sets off a widespread blackout and damages power plants and prolonging an outage.

While this sector is no stranger to regulations the challenges have heightened the importance of effective IT security to continue delivering a stable supply of energy and keep economies growing. Today organizations of all sizes in the energy sector not only need tough security but also the ability to validate compliance to a broad audience of stakeholders. TrustNet´s industry experts understand these challenges and help organizations in the energy sector to mitigate these risks and provide the most effective and efficient security and compliance solutions.

How TrustNet Helps Energy and Utility Companies

Security-as-a-Service

The iTrust security management platform protects computer networks from unauthorized use and malicious attacks from both internal and external sources. iTrust continuously and proactively monitors all network access points enabling energy industry players to rapidly identify security issues and eliminate network vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. The system provides transparent, unobtrusive, continuous, surveillance, interception, and response to security threats. The cloud and appliance based security-as-a-service is designed for organizations with limited in-house security resources who face the same type of threats as large enterprises. The iTrust security management platform is delivered as an on-demand Web service and fulfills both security and compliance objectives significantly more cost-effectively than traditional enterprise software and hardware.