In the past two years, the transformation of the energy industry has accelerated. We caught up with Bodo Zeug, Executive Vice President and Head of Landis+Gyr EMEA, and discussed with him about the megatrends in the energy sector, how they affect utilities and how Landis+Gyr intends to support utilities in tackling current and upcoming challenges.
In its working paper "Critical Vulnerability in Log4j - Detection and Response", the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) underlines the persistent and complex danger of the Log4Shell vulnerability in industrial networks as well. Patching the vulnerability in the short to medium term is considered unrealistic for many companies. For this reason, the BSI recommends continuous monitoring and analysis of network communication via anomaly detection in addition to rule-based query analysis. Industrial anomaly detection solutions, as offered by Rhebo, a Landis+Gyr Company, enable companies to detect on compromises that have already occurred, active exploits and other malicious activities in the operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) at an early stage. The vulnerability, documented as CVE-2021-44228, allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on systems using the widespread Log4j library without authentication.
As decarbonization, deentralization and digitalization continue to affect the energy industry, DSO's are taking on new roles and greater challenges in ensuring a reliable, resilient grid. In the IoT era of OT/IT convergence , where are you in your journey to transformation ?
The digitalization of the energy industry has led to a convergence of operational and informational technologies across metering infrastructures worldwide. This OT/IT convergence brings with it all the benefits of the connected, IoT era such as personal energy management insights, automated energy management and grid transparency. However it has also resulted in increasingly complex OT/IT ecosystems creating with new areas of vulnerability and increasing exposure to attacks.
Landis+Gyr’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) service operations have attained the ISO / IEC 20000 certification. This achievement underpins Landis+Gyr’s strategic focus to further enhance its service capabilities and managed services business, as well as promote best practice within the industry.
Liechtensteinische Kraftwerke (LKW) has outsourced data and software hosting for its smart metering system. Hosting in connection with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) contract covers data from more than 45,000 metering points and complies with the strictest security and availability criteria. After more than a year of productive operation, the verdict is positive: Data protection and system stability benefit from the externally operated technology platform; the cost-efficiency of smart metering has been optimized through the shift from capital to operating expenses. SaaS clearly represents a sensible path towards digitization, particularly for public utilities and smaller companies with fewer financial and human resources, which already operate a smart metering infrastructure or are about to roll one out.
