Refocusing Solutions to Mitigate Dilemmas to Infrastructure Protection

While infrastructure gap dilemmas are most apparent in the energy sector, becoming a “critical path” in the fabric of every national economy; Energy is crucial sector that contends with meaningful and rapidly evolving security risk to both operations and data, and does so on an aging and frequently vulnerable information infrastructure. Faced with the dual and sometimes conflicting responsibilities of maintaining both operational availability and efficiency of these systems, those tasked with ensuring they are secure are scrambling to meet this challenge.

A potential solution is one not often associated with critical infrastructure; the cloud. More specifically, the class of technologies upon which modern cloud computing has been built; virtualization. Traditionally, the idea of energy sector systems becoming “cloud-enabled” has been met with a combination of skepticism and fear.

Skepticism that such aged systems could leverage cloud technologies without massive investments in time and budget. And outright fear that cloud-enabling the energy sector would open systems to new threats and negatively impact smooth operations. This thinking needs to change. There is an incredible opportunity for critical infrastructure organisations to learn from a significant technology movement happening in the commercial and government sectors.

A growing number of those organisations are leveraging virtualization and cloud to transform security – reducing risk and complexity without having to “rip and replace” physical infrastructure.