In 2023, the Microsoft Digital Defense Report revealed that critical infrastructure remained a persistent target for cyberthreats, increasing again from the previous year.1 The interconnectivity of the power industry with global commerce makes its infrastructure both essential and vulnerable. Without it, we can no longer power hospitals, heat and cool homes, open schools, or produce food. Power supply is the lifeblood of the global economy, and our resilience depends on it.
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A growing need to transform security
Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) at power companies know this reality well. They’re tasked with managing a complicated portfolio while protecting against cyber risks from both insiders and nation-state actors. Left unresolved, these challenges create a ripple effect across the enterprise and lead to issues like:
- Increasingly complex environments: Widespread digital adoption combined with evolving customer preferences, decentralized energy generation, and a changing workforce are driving utility providers to rethink their services and business models to help increase flexibility and maintain a resilient grid. In a recent survey conducted by Guidehouse and Public Utilities Fortnightly, 61% of respondents agreed that increasing flexibility to improve energy system resilience is the highest priority outcome for utility investments today.2
- Tool fatigue: Many power companies work with hundreds of disparate management tools that are costly to manage and limited in cross-visibility. These tools must be integrated and maintained by teams with the right skillsets. As tools are added or replaced and personnel come and go, companies face the inevitable costs of re-skilling and new integrations.
- Technical debt: While many utilities are designing new solutions in support of energy transition and the grid of the future, they still rely heavily on legacy infrastructures that carry significant tech debt. These legacy systems increase cybersecurity and operational risks as well as operational expenses through extended support costs, timelines, and integration complexities. Research shows companies pay an additional 10 to 20% to address tech debt on top of project base costs.3
Modernizing infrastructure is costly and not easily adaptable as the risk landscape evolves. In fact, 59% of cybersecurity teams identify integration of legacy operational technology (OT) and modern information technology (IT) systems as their biggest challenge to securing OT.4 If you’re a CISO, how do you solve the challenge of securing both IT and OT against modern and fast-changing threats?
The answer is to work with technology partners who not only understand threat actors around the world, but who also recognize the business risks and operational concerns across the industry.
Increasing security and efficiency without sacrificing value
With a unified security stack running on the Microsoft Cloud, utilities can significantly reduce the number of tools they manage every day for lower costs, time-savings, and better insight into IT and OT environments.
For example, Turkish energy provider Enerjisa Üretim partnered with Senkron.Energy Digital Services to build Senkron ROC, a remote operations center that represents a critical piece of becoming cloud-native. Knowing that a single cyberthreat could shut down operations, Enerjisa Üretim also established its Operational Technology-Specific Security Operation Center (OT SOC), which relies on Microsoft Defender for IoT and Microsoft Sentinel to operate around the clock and process 3.3 million security events daily.
The IBM Maximo Application Suite on Azure for asset operations and maintenance is another example. High performance and ultra-low latency combined with the multi-layered security capabilities of the Microsoft Azure stack provide a foundation for secure analytics that boost operational resiliency and reliability. With those advanced security features, utility providers can scale their operations to handle varying workloads without compromising operational security.
Security solutions to meet your needs
With Microsoft Security services, customers can leverage the latest technologies and deep industry understanding to enhance their security posture today. Microsoft Defender for IoT offers a complete inventory and continuous monitoring of connected assets across vendors and protocols; Microsoft Purview can secure and govern data across your entire estate while helping to reduce risk and meet compliance requirements; and Microsoft Sentinel provides enterprise-grade intelligent security analytics that help detect previously undetected threats and minimize false positives.
Microsoft security solutions can also offer improvements across key use cases, including:
- Augmentation of security operations centers (SOCs): Microsoft security solutions empower SOCs with cloud-native capabilities that enable faster detection and response times—even automating entire responses to security events. Machine learning, AI, and advanced analytics perform the heavy lifting so SOC workers can clarify what’s happening in the SOC environment and focus on the highest-priority events. Our unified security platform eases tool fatigue in SOCs with solutions that work together seamlessly for optimal visibility and efficiency. Solutions such as Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR and Microsoft Incident Response allow for expanded capabilities to support the SOC analysts in their mission.
- Business continuity and disaster recovery: Microsoft security solutions provide automated backup processes that are both scalable and cost-effective, and they can be integrated with on-premise data protection solutions. Our solutions include features like encryption and multi-factor authentication, which protect data during the backup and recovery process and help keep sensitive information secure. This holistic approach helps utility organizations quickly recover from data loss incidents, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity.
Supporting the energy customer and partner ecosystem for a secure future
To support continued innovation in data security and cloud adoption, we collaborated with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office on an initiative for seamless integration of cloud technology into the grid of the future. Now in its pilot phase, the Cirrus cloud feasibility assessment tool (Cirrus) offers strategic guidance on how to prepare for, or deploy, a cloud solution responsibly, with the ultimate objective to strengthen the resilience and future adaptability of a decarbonized electric grid.
Built on the security and reliability of Azure, the online version of Cirrus is also accessible through independent platforms with a license. The tool provides valuable insights to integrators, stakeholders, and operators by clarifying goals, future plans, and risk tolerance.
With visual outputs like key performance indicator (KPI) graphs and consequence diagrams, Cirrus offers contextualized understanding, helping users prioritize critical systems and data based on potential benefits and risks associated with cloud disruptions. Additionally, Cirrus incorporates threat detection and alerts, leveraging Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) principles to empower organizations to make risk-informed decisions and address high-consequence events.
Opportunities on the horizon with AI
It’s an exciting time for the industry as AI creates tremendous potential for energy companies to increase their security posture.
Imagine equipping workers with Microsoft Copilot for Security to help them identify threats earlier, build their risk mitigation skills, and respond to incidents faster. What took hours or days to complete can now be finished in minutes with AI. The efficiency is about more than labor costs. Every minute that goes by gives attackers more opportunity to wreak havoc across the board.
With AI advancements analyzing trillions of security signals daily, together we can build a safer, more resilient digital energy ecosystem.
Learn more with Microsoft for energy and resources
Ready to dive deeper? Don’t miss our webinar, Rethinking cybersecurity in a renewable-powered energy system on October 10, 2024, where we will be sharing how leading energy companies are using the power of technology to safeguard their businesses. Read more about the webinar and sign up to attend.
1 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, October 2023.
2 The Power Industry: Presently and Projected, Guidehouse, July 2024.
3 Breaking technical debt’s vicious cycle to modernize your business, McKinsey & Company, April 2023.
4 How is cyber innovation disrupting the energy sector and critical infrastructure?, World Economic Forum, October 2023.
Hanna Grene is Worldwide Leader for Go-To-Market Strategy and Operations for the Energy and Resources Industry at Microsoft, leading a team for each energy vertical, partnerships, and field enablement. She has worked closely with governments and Fortune 500 companies globally to accelerate investment and innovation in a decarbonized, secure, and affordable energy system.
Mikhail Falkovich is Customer Security Officer at Microsoft with more than 20 years in the utilities industry. He is the former CISO of Con Edison protecting NYC’s power, gas, and steam systems, and customer and company information, with extensive experience in critical infrastructure protection, OT security, network architecture, and collective defense.
