Utilities monitor and control the delivery of essential services such as electricity, natural gas, water, waste treatment and transportation. This makes their information systems an integral part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

Incidents in utility companies tend to attract significant media attention. Reputation damage can negatively affect both the utility as well as its suppliers, business partners and customers. In the most serious cases this can have consequences for both the operational functions of the utility and for overall business viability.

“SCADA” is an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition and refers to computer systems that control and monitor critical functions in an industrial context. Designing, reviewing and supporting SCADA systems requires very specialised skills and experience.

“SCADA data is of a real-time nature, and requires very high levels of integrity and availability. If this data is compromised the consequences can be catastrophic. If a SCADA system is compromised or unavailable the organisation may not be able to effectively manage its critical functions. A security incident in a SCADA network resulting in loss or degradation of service provision is also likely to subject the utility to regulatory and financial penalties. Most importantly compromises to SCADA systems could potentially result in injury or death.

At DMA we are able to provide a range of SCADA services including:

• security reviews of SCADA deployments;
• evaluation of security capabilities/limitations of existing SCADA systems;
• evaluation of client requirements and development of SCADA system architectures, including interconnection to corporate networks;
• pre-deployment architecture and implementation reviews;
• development of SCADA security policies;
• auditing critical infrastructure SCADA deployments; and
• evaluation/recommendation of field instrumentation and data acquisition devices.