download data is mission critical for any company

One obvious inefficiency here is manually retyping messages to send them across the ‘air-gap’.

Historically this has led people inside high security sites having to switch between computers and networks. Strict security measures are essential to keep information secure at all times. Head office communicates with the two sites and communicates with the rest of the world. The organisation’s head office (based in a third jurisdiction) isn’t air-gapped. These allow people on site to communicate while mitigating the risk of information being inadvertently leaked via the internet. Communications in this scenario are sensitive, potentially even classified, and need to be sufficiently robust and reliable to operate through a crisis.īoth sites contain physically isolated computer networks known as ‘air-gapped’ networks. Imagine an organisation responsible for decommissioning two sites (in two different jurisdictions) used for energy production over the past 50+ years. Every ‘central server in a network’ is another ‘Nord Stream 2’ waiting to happen. The fundamental problem with all these depleting communication platforms is one that’s very familiar to utility companies centralised networks are inherently weak because they rely on single points of failure. So utility firms often, especially in a crisis, end up with incident response teams resorting to the likes of WhatsApp and Signal free consumer-grade apps with zero corporate oversight or control. Of course there’s also Microsoft Teams or Slack, but they - too - are insecure and brittle and siloed to the point of being unusable across a supply chain. Instead they have email an exhausted fossil that is insecure, brittle and slow. So it should be no surprise that utilities need secure, mission critical real time communications across both the company and its supply chain. The need to move away from fossil-fuelled conversations The comparatively mundane ransomware strike on South Staffordshire Water during last summer’s UK water shortage is one of hundreds of examples of attacks that rarely make the headlines. Sophisticated cyberattacks on the Colonial Pipeline Company (US), the SolarWinds supply chain (global) and key European oil terminals (Netherlands/Belgium) are just some of the recent examples that show utility firms are increasingly targeted. Last year’s sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline demonstrates that large scale physical attacks are not just a theoretical risk.

Download data is mission critical for any company