As energy companies transform digitally to meet customer needs, including providing greater energy usage transparency and real-time updates on outages, they are increasingly adopting new technologies.
For example, many utility providers have been deploying smart meters to digitize infrastructure and enable real-time data transfers to data centers, with installed smart meters expected to exceed 1.75 billion by 2030. This expansion of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) ensures the grid is more reliable, expedites outage alerts, and provides insight into customer power usage and behaviors.
However, this also means utility IT teams have more systems to monitor than ever— from the operational technology (OT) used to generate and distribute power – including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and Distributed Network Protocol 3 (DNP3) communications – to the business networks that manage applications crucial to the customer experience.
Adding more connected devices to the service delivery chain also creates additional potential points of failure, and disruptions or slowdowns in these systems threaten service reliability and continuity, resulting in potentially longer outage times, diminished customer satisfaction, and loss of revenue.
To address these challenges, expanding end-through-end visibility across these systems is critical for IT teams tasked with detecting abnormalities and security vulnerabilities, helping prevent and detect service disruptions before they escalate.
Continuous Monitoring Ensures Reliable Utility Network Performance
Performance issues with connected devices and applications can severely impact an energy company’s services, yet IT teams may not always understand the root causes of performance degradation without visibility into the network. For example, failures in OT networks can lead to delays in generating and distributing power, retrieving smart meter data, dropped service calls, and communication breakdowns between substations and data centers. These disruptions further slow down field operations teams who depend on remote access to complete service tasks and document repairs.
Power companies don’t have unlimited resources. In the event of a massive outage, where every second toward service restoration matters, knowing the actual problems impacting a transmission line or substation without having to send a crew out immediately helps operators effectively triage and put boots on the ground where they are needed the most.
Continuous, end-to-end monitoring of both OT and business networks ensures that IT and operations teams can understand the data traffic flows that their applications depend on, including when issues cross these domains. For example, with packet-level intelligence, IT teams can pinpoint if latency or slowness is being introduced by a cloud-based application or at different network handoff points. Further, configuring regular business transaction tests on critical OT application services can provide early warning of emerging issues at substations enabling IT intervention remotely that avoids local power disruptions.
Indeed, when utility IT teams have real-time visibility into the data traffic flows that their applications depend on, it is much easier to identify service slowdowns and points of disruption. Additionally, as public utilities and other providers of critical infrastructure continue to be a leading target, seeing a 55% increase in DDoS attacks over the past four years, among other types of cyber attacks, continuous network monitoring at scale gives IT, OT, and security teams a shared language to detect abnormalities and safeguard critical applications.
Securing Operational Technology
In 2024, almost 75% of OT professionals across industries experienced intrusions that impacted their OT systems in some way, up from 49% in 2023. Now consider that security issues are often misdiagnosed as performance issues and vice versa. In other words, what may initially present as a sluggish application may actually be a warning sign that the network or application in question is under attack.
Widespread packet capture at scale allows cross-functional teams to quickly identify the root causes of application and OT performance issues, including whether a security issue may be to blame, using a shared language: packet data. This allows for greater collaboration in the event of a successful attack, and advanced network detection and response systems can be used to look back retroactively to investigate the communication of compromised hosts, determine how and when the network breach happened, including if there was lateral movement, and check to see if a data breach has occurred.
As utilities add more and more connected devices to their networks, expanding visibility across OT and business networks empowers teams to work more collaboratively, minimize the time spent troubleshooting, and ultimately allow for more efficient operations.
Getting Ahead of Digital Transformation Challenges
As energy companies continue to digitize operations, adopting new technologies is helping them meet customer expectations. However, this digital transformation brings new challenges, including the need to monitor the expanding network of systems.
By implementing end-to-end visibility across both OT and business networks, utility can more easily prevent service disruptions, troubleshoot issues faster, and maintain the security and
reliability of power grids, to ultimately meet their “always-on” objectives and protect the interrupted flow of energy to customers.
