Energy & Utilities

Ransomware 

Attacks against programmable logic controllers (PLC) and industrial control systems used in many energy and utilities operational environments are on the increase. Many of these systems go for long periods without patching or fixing vulnerabilities. A test scenario was recently run that showed a ransomware attack targeting a water supplier control system, threatening to dump dangerous levels of chlorine in the water should the ransom not be paid

Scale of data

Energy organizations have increasing data such as advanced metering data, engineering systems, R&D data and ERPs, including workloads on multiple offline and online locations, making it difficult to keep costs low

Shift to hybrid

Energy and Utilities IT workloads are utilizing a broad range of hardware and storage solutions creating hybrid environments which are hard to manage. Dealing with increasing amounts of data, new interpretation, visualization, modelling applications, and new access methods such as virtual desktops, is putting energy IT management under tremendous pressure.