The Challenges of Implementing Smart Grid

As yet, Smart Grid has no single accepted definition, is comprised of many (not always complementary) technologies, is controversial with regard to consumer privacy, and has an overall absence of standardization and regulation. Additionally, utilities and private energy companies are at different stages of adoption.  Because the industry is in such flux, no standards or accepted sets of best practices have been established, forcing organizations to establish these for themselves – both from an operations as well as a security perspective.

Though many organizations predict logging and log management will be key to establishing security within these Smart Grid environments, variations in technology and a lack of standards are a hindrance. With equipment from many different Smart Grid vendors, each with its own data format, a lack of standardization poses a challenge to utilities wishing to use a log management tool for event alerting and correlation.

“As we start to get into consumer energy distribution and home area networking, we’re expecting dozens, if not more, of additional vendors,” says a security operations lead. “We know that everyone from Google to Microsoft to a half dozen others will want to jump in on that space.”

Additionally, regulatory standards have not yet been established for Smart Grid Technology, something that is likely to become critically important in the future as Smart Grid gains momentum.

Our next post gets into how those managing a Smart Grid are using LogLogic.

(For the full story, download our Smart Grid white paper. Its the first one in the list.)