The integrated network operations center: an IT-OT enabler

By Dale Robinson

The smart grid is a convergence of the electrical and information infrastructures. This convergence occurs at both systems and operational levels.  Integrating these two infrastructures to operate in a coordinated manner requires elimination of traditional information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) boundaries. Utilities not able to get a handle on this integration imperative may find it

Dale Robinson is a manager in Accenture’s Network-Enabled Solutions Group. He has over 15 years of experience in wireless networks design, deployment and operations across a variety of industries, such as carriers, utilities, retailers, cable and government. Currently, Dale is working on a number of smart grid and smart metering initiatives. For more information, contact him at dale.e.robinson@accenture.com.

difficult to fully leverage their smart grid data and operational capabilities, manage costs or  take advantage of new business opportunities made possible by the smart grid.

Converging IT and OT has been a challenge. The work force tries must coordinate different systems, legacy operational structures, business processes and business objectives. As utilities seek to achieve IT-OT alignment, an integrated platform is a prerequisite. To enable an integrated platform, a move towards open, standardized protocols that apply across both IT and OT is required. This also means any management solution for a smart grid/advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network that spans both IT and OT systems should be based on supporting these open protocols, while also having the capability to interface with legacy systems.

For a smart grid network management system (NMS) to be implemented effectively, it should ideally be ready to deploy “out of the box.” The NMS should provide comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring of a utility’s smart grid sub-networks, (for example, metering, distribution automation, WAN links and enterprise WAN).  Since smart grids are a composite of multiple sub-networks, each with their own characteristics, the NMS for smart grid also has capabilities to function as a “manager of network managers.”

This manager of managers would provide a single console with a unified view across multiple smart grid network technologies and service layers. This can eliminate redundant responses to multiple alarms that can result from a single failure and thereby help reduce overall utility NOC costs. For a smart grid network management system to be effective, it needs to address some of the key challenges in IT-OT enablement, such as cross-system integration, end-to-end data security and smart grid operations insight and governance.

The importance of a unified technology view

Legacy IT and OT systems have evolved in very different environments and largely exist in silos. As a result, when something goes wrong, it’s often difficult to determine the source of the problem.  Today’s grid devices are more than just passive network endpoints, as they now encompass added communication abilities and, in some cases, intelligence. Managing endpoints requires an understanding of the different dimensions of each endpoint and correlating its multiple data points. Some of those data points belong in the domain of OT and others belong to IT.

As change and configuration issues contribute to many of the operational faults that the operations team is responsible for troubleshooting, the ability to view server or network change events from the operation topology map is critical to cross-domain operation. By having this unified technology view, IT and OT teams are better able to work together, navigating in context from the operational view to the detailed IT configuration view. This enables incident/problem processes to leverage change and configuration processes.

Data/network security

Data and network security through the lens of IT and OT are very different. Within the converged infrastructure, however, those differences are blurred. IT security usually stops at the firewalls of the corporate LAN, while a large part of OT security exists in the field. Utilities have found that simply extending IT security to cover the OT needs for smart grid is not practical technologically and operationally.  Meeting the security needs for IT and OT requires bridging this gap with a security framework that ties both together. This security framework can help to ensure end-to-end security between the smart grid systems and endpoints, while not compromising the underlying security requirements of each organization. Smart grid NMS can provide capabilities that secure network devices and data transmission between smart grid endpoints (home devices, sensors, relays, meters, etc.) and the utility data center.

Smart grid operations insight

Smart grid operations insight helps to enable alignment of strategic planning, governance, business functions and technologies across both IT and OT. Being able to gather, analyze and correlate data from disparate systems and multiple endpoints across the electric grid network and the utility enterprise network is critical to this function. The smart grid NMS offers cross-domain discovery, monitoring and analysis of networks, servers, storage, collectors, sensors, meters and utility data center systems, such as meter data management systems (MDMS), distribution management systems (DMS), etc. and an NMS also can help address issues such as:

.

• What happens when an AMI component or grid sensor fails? The NMS enables the operations center to be notified of the root cause and allows immediate event correlation and determination of business impact. Once notification, analysis and root cause are determined, a work order can be created and routed to the appropriate workforce to dispatch a truck roll. Once the work is completed, the ticket can be closed and lessons learned captured to better anticipate future events.

• How do you correlate information across sub-network layers? The smart grid NMS can pull information on the different devices and links – data traffic, percent utilization, routing topology, device status – across sub-network layers. By trending and correlating the varied data across the network, the NMS allows better management of limited resources and costs, such as cellular WAN links.