Data Resilience and Operational Continuity Strategies for the Utilities Industry
Cyber incidents and weather-related disaster are important issues to this industry, and given the changing threat and landscape -- from both manufactured and natural disruptions -- it is a topic that is growing in strategic importance
Utilities will have to accelerate the reinvention of their core businesses while deploying new secure business models to capture new revenue streams while protecting existing operations, according to the most recent IDC FutureScape report.
More organizations have started investing in a balance of more preventive technologies and recovery strategies to ensure that resiliency is maintained.
As the industry comes to grips with the highly disruptive implications of a once-in-a-generation pandemic event, executives are bracing themselves for continued volatility as incidences of unprecedented weather events rise, and bad actors target critical infrastructures with malware and ransomware attacks.
The utility industry is facing strategic implications of the shifting landscape of risk; how leaders have responded in protecting data and maintaining continuous operations; key investments that must be made and coordinated to ensure data protection and operational continuity as hazards; and threats to the sector rise. There are critical technology management options for securely advancing the innovation agenda across utilities while mitigating the risks of catastrophic service interruptions.
BizTechReports caught up with Neeraj Sripuram of IBM to discuss key data points from a recent World Economic Forum report.
“The report specifically called out how cyber incidents and extreme weather events have emerged as critical items that affect the utility industry’s ability to manage operations reliably,” says IBM’s Sripuram, “[Cyber incidents and weather-related disaster] are important issues to this industry, and given the changing threat and landscape -- from both manufactured and natural disruptions -- it is a topic that is growing in strategic importance.”
Utilities will have to accelerate the reinvention of their core businesses while deploying new secure business models to capture new revenue streams while protecting existing operations, according to the most recent IDC FutureScape report. Resilience will be an important factor in developing secure, highly available services. This implies a different approach to business and tech ecosystems to deliver one integrated experience to customers.
“The picture is further complicated by the changing typology of data and expectations of business within the utilities and energy sector. The customer topography has changed in terms of availability and the serviceability of customers. Moreover, the advent of smaller disruptive players in the energy space is bringing new alternative energy value propositions to market,” noted Sripuram.
This is causing a significant cultural and operational mindshare shift within the sector. “For a long time, spending towards security and cyber resiliency has been more seen as an insurance policy. The rising frequency and intensity of incidents, however, are changing attitudes about cyber risks and resilience. More organizations have started investing in a balance of more preventive technologies and recovery strategies to ensure that resiliency is maintained. There's a very positive shift in the C-suite and the business. Several executives in the room discussed how they are revisiting data governance strategies to see what can be in the event of a breach,” adds Sripuram.
Integrating investments in open source technologies and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings can lead to improving the industry’s security posture.
“Many of these use cases call for integrating orchestration methodologies within resiliency and recovery processes to reduce manual intervention and to ensure that as much work as possible to return to normal operations after a disruption is performed at the application level, rather than an infrastructure level. To accomplish this, we discussed how they are tying investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to the overarching resilience strategies.”
For more information about BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.