Ensuring Operational Excellence Amid Digital Transformation in Utilities

Digital transformation is a key initiative for energy companies as they transition to smart grids. This digital transformation in the utilities industry is fueled by the need to meet customer requirements, therefore improving the customer experience and satisfaction. New technologies are paramount to providing real-time updates on service disruptions and outages, usage transparency, and more. As utilities adopt new applications, network environments become more complex, necessitating scalable visibility into the performance of new and old applications while assuring efficient communication between them.

Challenges of Managing Expanding IT and OT Systems

Monitoring the diverse systems across utility networks can be a major challenge. Operational technology (OT) platforms, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3) communications, create additional complexity when they need to be monitored in tandem with the IT systems, business networks, and more that manage the mission-critical applications that impact user experience. The sheer scale and distribution of these network and application areas make it a daunting task to achieve visibility and actionable insights across the IT environment.

Increasing the connectivity across more network devices creates additional failure points, which need to be monitored closely and at scale to prevent potential disruptions to service continuity that can impact revenue. Investing in scalable network and application observability solutions can help improve mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and, ultimately, mean time to repair (MTTR), restoring services for customers faster and preventing poor experiences due to extended outages.

Importance of End-to-End Visibility

Continuous monitoring of the distributed network infrastructure has several benefits for energy providers. First, detecting abnormalities and security vulnerabilities before adversaries do helps to ensure sensitive data, such as customer information, does not fall into the wrong hands. Swift intruder detection is key to minimizing the damage done by the inevitable cyberattack. Second, end-to-end visibility can prevent service disruptions before they escalate to major outages. When issues are detected early, customer communication can be expedited, as can repairs and restorations, to provide clear expectations and minimize the scale of outages.

End-to-end visibility has operational impacts as well. Identifying the root causes of OT and application performance issues empowers teams to fix the right issues immediately, preventing repeated, preventable disruptions from occurring due to ongoing issues. In turn, service restoration times can be reduced during outages due to actionable insights provided based on detailed network data pulled from raw packet data via deep packet inspection.

In managing key initiatives related to grid modernization, there are two key visibility areas to focus on: improving safety, reliability, and security; and private LTE and 5G networks.

As utility companies modernize grids, safety, reliability, and security remain the top priorities—in that order—when measuring the core service of power delivery. This is despite changes in demand and the impacts of climate change. Safety can be improved by achieving granular visibility into the services running across the OT network, empowering teams to have sub-second latency for catastrophic events such as downed power lines, exploding transformers, or maintenance accidents. Reliability is improved by leveraging a comprehensive solution that enables teams to utilize a single data source for availability, performance, and cybersecurity applications. Finally, security becomes more important as grids become more interconnected. With legacy devices and applications on the network alongside more-advanced applications, visibility and monitoring challenges arise, making packet-based visibility key to both IT and OT teams.

Ensuring Reliable Network Performance

The monitoring of applications and connected devices, such as smart meters, is critical for avoiding delays in power generation and distribution. This observability also prevents disruptions in communication between substations and data centers, creating a more efficient flow of services and improving customer experience and operational efficiency. This ultimately delivers services to customers faster and more efficiently while allowing energy providers to get detailed customer insights directly from the meter.

Real-time visibility plays a major role in these workflows and capabilities. It allows IT teams to pinpoint issues at network handoff points, simplifying issue detection and expediting repairs. It also enables proactive business transaction tests to allow for early warning systems of potential issues when conducting business as usual.

All of this boils up to creating greater efficiency, leading to streamlined workflows and more uptime for customers—which helps to improve revenue streams and customer satisfaction.

Addressing Cybersecurity Risks in OT Systems

Cybersecurity risks are a real danger for utility providers, and they are only rising in prevalence and sophistication. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against utility companies have shown a 55 percent increase in the past four years. These attacks flood networks and applications with illegitimate traffic, leading to slowdowns or even taking down power grids, creating major issues for energy companies and customers alike. Often, these security issues are misdiagnosed as performance issues, leading to extended outages and disgruntled customers.

Using widespread packet capture for root cause analysis can help identify these attacks faster and with greater accuracy. Powerful packet-based cybersecurity solutions can enable advanced network detection to empower teams to conduct retroactive investigations into issues, helping to identify and remove cyberthreats from network and application environments.

Enhancing Collaboration Across Teams

Leveraging a shared data source for visibility across IT, OT, and security teams has many benefits. One benefit is the ability to share data, improving collaboration to minimize troubleshooting time and resolving issues faster. It also strengthens critical infrastructure security. Finally, sharing the data source means one investment in infrastructure can feed several disciplines, reducing initial investments while accomplishing multiple goals.

Preparing for the Future

The importance of end-to-end visibility in supporting digital transformation in utility companies cannot be overstated. With powerful visibility, the only place an adversary or issue cannot hide is on the network. Strong, actionable data helps ensure operational resilience and service reliability, improving customer experience as the energy industry becomes more and more connected.

Adopt tools and strategies to safeguard power grids and maintain uninterrupted energy delivery. Adopt NETSCOUT.

Contact us to learn how NETSCOUT improves utility IT and OT performance and security.