Situation Management Solution for Electric Utilities Improves Security Operations and Compliance
One of the main challenges being faced by electric utilities in the United States today is ensuring effective security operations that can handle incidents in real time, with limited resources across hundreds of sites that are often equipped with thousands of monitored sensors and multiple disparate security and safety systems.
NICE Systems Ltd., a company that helps the enterprise and security sectors improve business performance, decrease financial risk, and enhance safety and security, today introduced NICE Situator for Electric Utilities.
The new offering, based on the company’s open platform situation management solution, helps electric utilities meet the challenges of improving compliance, particularly with respect to NERC CIP, increasing the effectiveness of their security operations, and reducing operational costs.
North American utilities in the US, Canada and Mexico need to comply with The NERC CIP reliability standards for ensuring the physical security of critical cyber assets that control or effect the reliability of bulk electric systems. Non-compliance can result in fines as high as $1 million per day per violation, based on incident severity and a number of risk factors.
The new NICE solution includes pre-built content based on industry-specific best practices. NICE also offers professional services for optimizing the utility’s situation management capabilities and overall security operations by identifying risk and developing policies and procedures and “Concept of Operation.”
Being able to identify a threat or a problem in real time and to handle it effectively and efficiently is crucial. In addition, performing continuous reporting after the fact is tedious and time-consuming.
Mike Dunn, founder of GMD Security Consulting Services LLC and former Manager of Security at American Electric Power, said, “With heightened security threats, reduced budgets, and ever-increasing compliance pressures, electric utilities today are faced with great challenges. Firms that implement a situation management solution which helps them consolidate 24/7 monitoring of disparate existing security systems, prescribe immediate response to event alarms, and automate documentation of response for future audit purposes, are best positioned to ensure an effective and efficient security operation.”
NICE Situator enables end-to-end handling of an incident’s full life cycle, by automatically triggering alerts, providing security personnel real-time guidance on required and optimal procedures, and enabling them later to retrieve the incident log along with all the supporting information for a complete and comprehensive report which includes when and where the alert had occurred, the relevant video and audio files, screen recordings, and logs from multiple third-party security systems.
The NICE offering enables capture, analysis and correlation of data from multiple sensors and systems, including audio, video, radio, geo-location and web, providing a framework for fusing data silos into a single operational view. NICE Security solutions empower organizations to act effectively in real time to prevent, manage and investigate incidents, ensuring fast resolution and debriefing, and continuous security improvements. NICE Security solutions are deployed worldwide in transportation systems, critical infrastructures, city centers and enterprise campuses.
Publicly traded NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) has its international headquarters in Israel and claims over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors.
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