Security Threats – The New Reality for Utilities

Security experts agree: Cyberattacks are the new reality for utility companies.

A major power outage hits the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas. For nearly two hours, participants were reminded that without electricity, the digital economy would not survive very well. In 2016, 3.85 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) [EIA] was consumed in the U.S., enabling consumers, transportations, commercial and industrials business to perform their daily activities.  No doubt that over the world, national and regional power grids are critical infrastructures requiring adequate protections such as the North-American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) plan.

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How to Overcome Privacy Program Stumbling Blocks

Our Security Services team works with customers to navigate these waters.

who is a lead consultant in our Privacy and Data Protection Services practice.  According to Steve, there are a few key areas where organizations can stumble:

◈ New dimensions of data access management
◈ Transparency
◈ Traceability and assurance

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Manufacturing mobility: Data, voice, video, and location

Manufacturers use wireless to increase margins, reduce cycle times, enable lean, and improve equipment productivity. While pervasive wireless connects sensors, tools, robots, AGVs, and RFID devices, it also enables mobility. Mobility supports far more than just cell phones, tablets, and laptops.

Very simply put, mobility drives data, voice, video and location applications.

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DevSecOps: Security at the Speed of Business

We will describe another key aspect of DevSecOps – developing security guardrails with a hands-on approach via Agile hackathons.

DevSecOps is about bridging DevOps workflows with Information Security (Infosec) Operations by embedding security as code during development, validation during testing and leveraging automation to run continuous operations. From many years in IT, we know that it’s a good idea to first prove ideas manually before we automate. Agile security hackathon is how we bring in participants from relevant disciplines within Information Security and application teams to first go through a set of implementation steps to configure the most important security requirements – the guardrails. With the winter Olympics in progress, this is akin to the guardrails that help a gravity powered Bobsled go faster along iced tracks in a safe manner.

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Continuous Integration and Deployment for the Network

The requisite for Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline being used in the network is growing. Continuous Integration and deployment helps counteract inaccuracies in daily network deployments and changes, hence is critically required. The upshot for change release and automated network testing is that changes are simplified, done more quickly and more streamlined, with CI/CD.

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Five things that are bigger than the Internet: Findings from this year’s Global Cloud Index

The scale of the Internet is awe-inspiring. By 2021, there will be 4.6 billion people and 27 billion devices connected to the Internet, and Internet traffic will reach 2.8 trillion Gigabytes (or 2.8 Zettabytes) per year.

Even with multiple Zettabytes crossing the network each year, there are some things that dwarf even the Internet. We started the Global Cloud Index (GCI) seven years ago in order to capture the scale of data more generally, as it relates to the advent of the cloud. In our most recent report, there are five categories of data that meet or exceed Internet traffic volume by 2021.

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Better design for simpler, more effective security

Few will contest the notion that security is complex.

Evolving threats.  Clever, motivated attackers.   And all too often, vendor-inflicted complexity of managing security from the mismatched consoles from dozens of vendors.

In this case, not only must users jump between consoles but the actions that become familiar in one console are not at all helpful or relevant in another.  Each new console amounts to a new security management process – adding to greater complexity.

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