Smart Grid Security

SAIC helps enable clients to design and implement the smart grid with confidence through a comprehensive and secure transformation of IT and communications infrastructure.

Securing Our Enabling Energy Infrastructure

SAIC's smart grid security solution helps clients to clearly identify requirements, risks, and issues, and manage them through the entire life cycle of the smart grid evolution. Our solution helps identify the full set of cybersecurity challenges that a smart grid transformation introduces. It brings awareness of these challenges up front and allows clients to consider them in a business value context.

Defining, Assessing, and Managing Security Risk

IT security threats, left unmanaged, can put the smart grid and the nation's critical infrastructure at undue risk. Using leading IT security frameworks, proven SAIC security best-practices, and a smart grid strategy for the future, SAIC helps enable clients to design and implement the smart grid with confidence through a comprehensive and secure transformation of IT and communications infrastructure.

Leveraging Market Experience and Thought Leadership

SAIC leverages its market experience and industry thought leadership across a number of key domains to lead efforts in securing critical infrastructure and the increasingly connected electric power infrastructure. SAIC delivers smart grid leadership, context, and value to customers as they undertake the planning and execution of this strategic transformation.

We leverage four key corporate areas of expertise:

A Changing Business

The electric power utility business is changing. Increasing pressure to improve system reliability, meet demand growth, improve asset utilization, control costs and prices, and retain knowledge from an aging workforce mean the old ways of doing business cannot be sustained. Additionally, regulated utility revenue models are moving away from pure unit-sold models toward performance-based rates where customer satisfaction and successful demand management become key business success factors.

When these considerations are coupled with the aging state of the North American power infrastructure and growing environmental concerns, change becomes not simply inevitable but urgent. Although in its infancy, the transformation of the electric power utility business has begun.

Transformative Change

The concept of a smart grid has been developed through a number of public-private partnerships to guide a transformation across the electric power marketplace. Through these efforts, the smart grid has been organized into a group of technologies and capabilities which define what the future electric power system must deliver. It includes strategies for advanced power system electronics, communications capabilities, advanced control and modeling systems, and real-time instrumentation.

Enabling Secure Communications

At the core of the smart grid transformation is the use of communications infrastructure to help enable instrumentation, analysis, and control of utility field assets across consumer service, distribution, transmission, and generation business areas. By leveraging modern communications infrastructure, utilities can collect, process, and transmit data required to automate processes, optimize assets, improve market forces, and proactively maintain high levels of reliability and quality. Without the use of modern communications systems, the promise of the smart grid and the transformed utility is simply unachievable.

While smart grid communication brings important new and transformative capabilities to utility operations, it also introduces new threats and risks to utility infrastructure. Legacy non-instrumented utility assets maintain a limited risk profile where external threats to infrastructure have generally required physical access or proximity.

The introduction of the smart grid's digitally enabled infrastructure brings with its new capabilities a number of new and evolving cybersecurity threats and liabilities which reach far beyond traditional localized threats. These emerging threats need to be managed for the full life cycle of these long-lived assets.