Empowering Electric Cooperatives: Overcoming Common Security Challenges

In the world of electricity generation and distribution, cooperatives and municipal utilities ensure power reaches communities across the nation. From large-scale power plants to smaller regional entities, the energy landscape is evolving rapidly. Technological advancements bring opportunities for greater efficiency and optimization, but they also introduce new challenges in security, availability, and operational resilience.

One common challenge faced by both electric cooperatives and municipal utilities is managing geographically distributed substations and sites. These networks are often spread far across a wide geographical area, making it challenging to oversee operations efficiently. To make informed decisions, teams need comprehensive visibility into the assets within their environment, their locations, and contextualized data regarding their behavior.

Addressing Electric Utility Challenges with EmberOT

Electric utilities face several specific challenges in assets and network management. Here’s a close look at these challenges and how EmberOT offers innovative solutions:

Challenge: Large-scale deployments are difficult throughout industrial environments.

Solution: Flexible, scalable sensors with minimal resource requirements

EmberOT’s sensors, known as Embers, are entirely software-based, offering the ability to deploy them with flexibility and scalability while still requiring minimal computing resources. Embers can be deployed virtually, in containers, or on existing industrial hardware with available computing resources in minutes, even in environments that are air-gapped or have limited connectivity.

Challenge: There is limited visibility throughout the industrial environment.

Solution: Deployment at the edge of OT environments provides near-complete visibility

Visibility into remote sites is often difficult to establish, making them challenging to monitor and maintain without manual processes or operator involvement. EmberOT addresses this by deploying Embers at the edge, providing near-complete visibility from Purdue level 1 and up. Operators, analysts, and other team members can see valuable asset information, insights, and network telemetry, including device-to-device communication across the environment.

Challenge: We don’t have the capacity to meet regulatory compliance requirements or audits.

Solution: Continuous monitoring and data capture automates certain compliance requirements.

Meeting regulatory requirements such as NERC, INSM, FERC, or NIS2 can be daunting. Embers facilitate data gathering for compliance by continuously monitoring network activity and changes in asset inventory, providing telemetry in real-time. This is all done while also collecting rolling packet captures, similar to a flight recorder, for historical or other analysis.

Challenge: Many of our asset identification and management processes are slow or manual.

Solution: Automate asset management with continuous updates.

Many smaller cooperatives and municipalities rely on manual processes or operator interactions to understand network activities. This can be time-consuming and inefficient, especially for those with smaller teams. Embers automatically update asset information and inventories as changes occur, eliminating the need for managing multiple spreadsheets. Embers curate and update relevant data at the edge so that organizations can make informed operational, financial, and managerial decisions.

Challenge: Existing resources don’t have the time to learn and manage another tool.

Solution: Embers are vendor-agnostic for seamless integration.

Managing additional tools can strain existing resources and slow processes down. Embers seamlessly integrate into existing environments and facilitate the transfer of curated data to where it’s needed most. This includes historians and data lakes to SIEMs, SOARs, MSSPs, and other existing tools.

Empowering Teams Across the Organization with Accessible Data

EmberOT empowers electric municipalities and cooperatives by focusing on making visibility data accessible and easy to use for teams across the organization.

Automated asset management and telemetry make it easy for users to deploy Embers at the edge (substations, power generation sites, etc.) to gather and curate relevant information. This reduces manual processes for asset discovery, identification, and management.

Continuous network monitoring enhances security and compliance by quickly identifying changes and updates to asset and network activity, including the detection of remote protocols. Continuous monitoring also captures transient events, so even temporary connections from third parties or vendors can be documented and investigated if necessary.

Flexible integration and data import make it easy to incorporate data from the Embers into existing tools and workflows. Users can consolidate asset information from multiple sources to enrich asset profiles for better visibility and easier management. 

In an era where efficiency, security, and compliance are paramount, EmberOT’s innovative solutions provide the tools needed to overcome challenges and empower cooperatives and utilities to deliver reliable power to communities across the nation. Doing more with less is not just a wish-list item; it’s a reality that enhances the resilience and efficiency of electric utilities.

Discover how EmberOT can help your cooperative or municipal utility achieve greater visibility and operational robustness. Reach out for a demo today and explore the future of electric utility management.