Utilities

Utilities face a difficult network operations and security climate. On the one hand, these organizations have massive, geographically diverse operations, including huge numbers of remote offices and mobile field technicians. Each connection represents a potential point of exposure, with its own user needs and patterns of network behavior. Unfortunately, traditional network management and security solutions do not operate easily across these high speed, highly switched, highly segmented environments because they are expensive and difficult to manage in large scale.

Leveraging NetFlow, sFlow and Lancope's StealthWatch® System combines behavior-based anomaly detection and network performance monitoring to protect critical information assets and ensure network performance by preventing costly downtime, repair and loss of reputation. By delivering end-to-end network visibility for security, network and datacenter administrators, StealthWatch eliminates network blind spots and reduces total network and security management costs.

How does StealthWatch help?

• Provides proof of regulatory compliance by baselining the network for normal activity and proactively detecting threats to the PCS and SCADA networks
• Real-time, continuous monitoring of network traffic patterns for immediate response to unexpected or unforeseeable network operations and security — maximizing protection against service interruption, business loss and negative publicity

• Host and network protection without requiring host agents or frequent attack signature database updates
• Flexible design that improves the performance of existing network management and security investment that easily extends overall network management and security strategy into new business opportunities
• Simple, straight-forward scalability across massive command-and-control enterprise deployments
• Cost-effective, easy-to-manage monitoring of large numbers of devices via powerful, graphical representations of current and expected network behavior
• Greatly reduces man-hour resources traditionally associated with incident response

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Henry County Water & Sewerage Authority Deploys StealthWatch
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Georgia’s (U.S) Henry County Water & Sewerage Authority (HCWSA) is using StealthWatch, with Cisco IOS NetFlow™ and sFlow® data, to diagnose and mitigate security threats, provide metrics for network provisioning, and enable customization of network configurations and policies to better secure and control its SCADA systems.

“With StealthWatch, we can identify security threats, capture statistics and data streams for capacity planning, enforce usage policies, and solve performance problems much faster. It also enables our staff to respond to network threats and outages quickly and intelligently, reducing business impact.” says Matthew Shoemaker, network / systems engineer for the HCWSA

Shoemaker notes that SCADA systems are “life and limb” to public sector entities like the HCWSA. “There are considerable security risks associated with even the smallest changes to the system. StealthWatch proved its value immediately by helping us determine the security and effectiveness of our SCADA changes in real time,” he says. Shoemaker also notes that identifying, testing, and remediating similar SCADA problems used to take several weeks. In contrast, “StealthWatch provides measurable results in days,” he notes.

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