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.

On the other, utilities face pressure from government regulations that mandate high levels of security as part of the national defense. Everyone depends on utilities to be available on a 24/7 basis, with any service interruption repaired as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, command-and-control systems such as SCADA were designed for a different, more trusting era. Today's open networks and heavy reliance on low-cost IP-based networks provide a new kind of challenge.

Failure is not an option for any utility. Regardless of the cause, outages more than impose an inconvenience on businesses and consumers. Short interruptions in service can threaten people's lives, whereas extended interruptions can create significant economic damage on a national level. Fortunately, the broadly dispersed command-and-control environments common to utilities are an ideal place to apply a behavior-based approach such as Lancope's StealthWatch™ network integrity solution.

Utilities must pre-empt potential threats, whether hardware, software or security in nature, before they become active incidents. StealthWatch's behavior-based design recognizes unexpected demands on networks and stops hidden threats that other technologies miss. More importantly, StealthWatch reacts to what is happening on a network in real-time. Other approaches do not have this immediate visibility into operations anywhere across the enterprise, and so can only respond after an incident has escalated into a crisis.

Utilities face a unique set of competing demands on limited resources. The goal is maximum protection against service interruption, business loss and negative publicity, and StealthWatch provides both performance and proof of regulatory compliance through:

• Real-time, continuous monitoring of network traffic patterns for immediate response to unexpected or unforeseeable network operations and security events
• 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