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Cyber security for energy and utilities

How secure is your security?

Whether you are protecting the electrical grid, power generation facilities or smart meters, system complexity is your biggest cyber-security challenge. When combating threats—such as viruses, worms, hijacking, and data mis-configuration, modification and theft—companies can fail to address vulnerable interfaces between their diverse systems or consider how their security infrastructure functions as a whole. The cyber security solution for energy and utilities from IBM is designed to evaluate your systems from end to end, cutting costs as it improves operational, financial and strategic efficiencies across your enterprise. We can help secure your information assets from Internet attacks virtually 24x7.

Stay ahead of cyber threats

As part of this solution, we evaluate your current security and test its responses, bolstering passive measures like firewalls with more active features such as anomaly detection. Our radio frequency (RF) specialists can assess your computer network for vulnerabilities. Our managed services teams can monitor your computer network remotely. And our systems technology group can support a range of high-availability servers and storage—if a server fails, another can take over, storing data and helping to keep your systems secure.

Integration is key to managing today’s complex security systems. Our team will work with you to interconnect systems, processes and people to help simplify how you manage security services, events and logs. We can also provide you with a consolidated security view through a Web-based management portal—a single interface to help you easily monitor all managed and unmanaged security devices.

This greater visibility can help you make more intelligent decisions that improve security throughout your company. Analyzing more complete information can help you improve existing safeguards, facilitate regulatory compliance and set parameters so small events don't trigger bigger problems. Detecting outages or identifying abnormal network incidents means you can respond more quickly, redirecting power or shutting down a substation. And as you increase efficiencies and reduce incidents, you can cut costs.

Safety first

Let IBM help you build a proactive, integrated approach to managing security risks, costs and regulatory compliance. Our solution is designed to:

• Guard against cyber attacks—internal and external.
• Address security vulnerabilities end to end.
• Avoid disruption of business flow, productivity and profitability.
• Cut costs through automation, increased efficiencies and reduced security breaches.
• Facilitate security compliance.

A better mousetrap

The cyber security solution features IBM’s proven, cutting-edge security technology, including:

• The IBM security framework offers end to end protection with compliance reporting across people and identities, data and information, applications and processes, IT and physical infrastructure.
• The IBM® Solution Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework, which can enable you to monitor all inputs from the smart grid or smart metering network. It can support analytics to flag events that indicate security breaches, such as suspicious usage patterns or cessation of hourly readings.
• The IBM Virtual Security Operations Center Portal, a secure, Web-based management tool designed for easy monitoring of all security devices.
• IBM Tivoli® software delivers comprehensive security for your dynamic infrastructure. This includes:
  • Identity and Access Assurance: efficient user lifecycle administration and access controls with integrated auditing.
  • Data and Application Security: for fine grained application entitlements, centralized security policy management and centralized encryption key lifecycle management.
  • Compliance Management with automated user activity monitoring, tracking, reporting and remediation is an integral part of all of the IBM offerings.
• The IBM Security Threat Mitigation solutions offer end-to-end risk management solutions to protect against the latest threats while reducing the costs and complexity of security.
• IBM Rational® software delivers comprehensive application vulnerability management. This includes:
  • Application Security: Protect against the threat of attacks and data breaches and assess vulnerabilities in networked applications and critical Web sites.
  • Web site compliance: Automate content scanning and analysis to help ensure compliance with privacy, accessibility, and key industry regulations.
  • Web application security solutions: Incorporate static and dynamic application security testing solutions to protect data and web applications against attacks.

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