When it comes to essential services such as power, gas, and water, zero downtime is the expected norm that must be met. Not only are these services, which are so basic to daily life, managed in computerized environments, ancillary services such as billing, customer service, installation, and more also comprise vital aspects of utilities’ operations.
To realize the high standards for reliability the industry requires, utility providers have established robust business continuity and disaster recovery practices, making major investments in hardware, storage, and software infrastructure to ensure 24/7 availability. Their IT environments have become hybrid and consist of legacy systems located in physical datacenters which work in concert with virtual environments residing in the private and public cloud. With that, new state-of-the-art operations and systems being adopted place strain on IT environments. They add complexity, require more maintenance, and there are more professionals involved in keeping myriad systems up to date and in line with best practices – all circumstances which can make IT environments more prone to unavailability and outages.
Cyberattacks on utilities have the potential to wreak untold damage – not only financially but also to the environment, to water quality, to infrastructure, and more. Utility professionals comprehend that a cyberattack is a real risk though relatively few utilities worldwide are prepared and could contain one. As utilities’ operational systems are increasingly connected, the risk scenarios multiply; energy-utilities are the fourth most targeted industry by ransomware; utility professionals rate physical and cyberattack as the most crucial issue facing their companies. Already, power utilities report having been affected by a mega-attack – an assault that can be perpetrated by nation-state actors. The dire consequences of cyberattacks exist alongside more well-known ramifications such as theft of valuable customer and business data and unrecoverable data.
All types of utility providers want to make sure they are not vulnerable to IT outages or to cyberattacks, including ransomware, and are able to recover data and systems within a reasonable timeframe. The complex set of challenges utilities face can be met by resilience solutions that proactively detect the misconfigurations in their IT environments that lead to service disruptions and outages. Thus, the key to avoiding such incidents and to assuring resilience lies in preventing disruptions, outages and cyber incidents before they impact your business.
Our trio of solutions enable IT and cyber resilience and cyber recoverability. They give IT and InfoSec teams the tools to proactively keep their environments resilient. They instantly identify and quickly prevent and repair threats to availability and data security.
AvailabilityGuard NXG™ proactively detects misconfigurations, single points of failure and other errors throughout all infrastructure layers before they impact your business. It prevents disruptions, outages and data loss.
StorageGuard™ uncovers hidden security risks to critical data storage systems (storage arrays, cloud storage, virtual SAN, file servers, file systems, raw devices, appliances, etc.) where high-value core data is stored. It ensures systems are configured correctly and data is inaccessible to malicious attackers.
RecoverGuard™ ensures that data systems in all types of IT environments are configured to enable recovery from cyberattack. It automatically detects IT misconfigurations that jeopardize IT ability to recover data and service in the event of a cyberattack, verifies that recovery from ransomware and other attacks is always possible through available and secured data copies, and ensures regulatory requirements are met.
All our solutions are supported by a Resilience Assurance Platform based on architecture that supports agile business requirements and serves as a single pane of glass through which IT can see, understand and manage its resilience and recovery needs. The platform delivers comprehensive reports of resilience status and makes use of an intuitive dashboard where tens of analyses of up-to-the-minute resilience levels are seen, and where more details can be learned by drilling down into any of the parameters shown.
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