Bringing network visibility to unmanaged power utility substations

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Profitap was tasked by a leading power utility company in a South-central State in the USA to provide network visibility to a group of unmanaged power substations that are moving from analog to digital systems. These stations are distributed in remote zones with almost no control or surveillance due to the hard-to-reach locations. Upgrading to digital systems is due to two main factors: compliance with one of the most industry-standard NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan (NERC) and mitigation from growing cyber risks. The NERC is compulsory by all utilities generating or distributing electric power, oil, water, or natural gas. NERC’s specific areas of concern are security awareness, physical security, remote access connections, and incident response.

“An electricity disruption such as a blackout or a hacker’s attack in one of these substations can have a domino effect, involving a series of failures that can affect banking, communications, traffic, and security for even an entire nation. We do not have clear network visibility for these remote substations, and we cannot afford to send an expert in loco each time network issues occur. We need fast and highly accurate troubleshooting to make sure we can act quickly and effectively.”- Explained the customer.

This leading power utility company selected and deployed in several strategic locations a customized version of IOTA - the award-winning all-in-one network traffic monitoring solution. Being easy to configure without the need for on-site technical staff, IOTA provided the customer detailed Power substation network traffic visibility to critical applications and data, allowing them to obtain real-time and historical network traffic without affecting the network performance and security.

“Thanks to IOTA Network application problems now can be resolved remotely and quickly, with full packet and metadata analysis.” – said the IT Manager in charge of deploying the solution.

• Network performance is maintained by keeping a close eye on the most essential performance metrics, retransmissions, packet loss, latency, throughput, availability, and connectivity
• Monitor network hosts, top talkers, bandwidth, latency, TCP, UDP, IPv4, IPv6, VLAN and DNS using a premade and intuitive set of comprehensive dashboards.
• Track down security flaws with full visibility over 200+ applications and protocols (DNS, HTTP, SSH, Office 365, Skype, Whatsapp, Netflix, etc.)
• Fully managed over HTTPS and with built-in VPN, offering easy deployment and usage in any network topology.
• Diagnose remote problems without on-site assistance.
• The monitored network is isolated from the management interface, and therefore helps to avoid any risk of injection of MITM attack through the device.