Enhancing the Digital Utility: Digitalization World!

This article was published in the Digital Utility Group of EnergyCentral on September 27, 2022. You can access that publication through the following link:

Here is the actual article:

Rogers Communications had a one-day service outage on July 8th of this year. Hundreds of businesses and thousands of homes, the majority of which are still home offices, were out of production and service. This indicates how significantly we all are depending on the Internet and data communications. Two years of COVID’s related lockdowns and stay-at-home mandates made us reliant on the Internet even more than before. These two years gave a good opportunity to many businesses to go digital and get rid of their paper footprints and urged many others to initiate projects for digitalization even if they were very happy with their old systems. Now customers want it digital and they have to comply with it.

Utilities were not an exception in this regard and not only did they change the customer-facing portals to more user-friendly features and functions, they or at least the majority of them changed the way of connecting and delivering services to more digital-based systems and processes. The recent technology enhancement and advancement is more and more digitalized and this by itself makes us not just dependent on the digital systems, but somehow addicted to them. In the Internet and data communications outage on July 8th, some people got sick of their lack of ability to work.

IoT and IIoT are currently heavily in use by utilities and other service providers to sense the changes, collect the data, analyze it and hopefully create some good data for the betterment of their services. Many of them have already started to employ AI for analyzing and enhancing their processes and services. Today, we can even see AI’s presence as the Virtual Assistant of some organizations in their customer-facing services interacting directly with humans. We can see a new gadget or App appearing every day and making our life easy and fast. Now we have the Metaverse where we can virtually or digitally go shopping, meet with friends, attend conferences and musical concerts and many more right from the comfort of our bedrooms.

Is the digitalization that is going this fast and taking over different aspects of our lives good? The obvious answer is Yes of course! But what we need to take into consideration is that technology enhancement and digitalization are for everyone including the bad guys. With faster computing devices and more enhanced features and functions, bad guys also can have more enhanced malicious files to access our networks and do whatever they want. Grids, water plants, and other critical infrastructures are the target of bad actors for financial or political gains. Even governments are not safe in this regard.

What makes governments, utilities, service providers and other entities vulnerable is the lack of proper protection plans and cybersecurity postures that are designed according to their specific needs. We all know that prevention is always better and more inexpensive than fixing and containing the damage that comes from a cyber attack. We all remember the Ukrainian national grid outage due to a cyber attack a couple of years ago that left hundreds of thousands of people out of power for a couple of days.?According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, the average cost of a data breach is over $4.5M and the average cost of a single lost record is over $160. The US is on top and Canada is the third from the top. Scary!, huh? Yes, it is.

So, digitalization not only is enhancing the utilities and gives them more control over their grids and networks, but it also comes with a great responsibility of securing the customers' data and protecting their privacy. Of course, there are other aspects of digitalization such as its effects on employment, the average cost of delivery to the customers, enhancing the geographical footprints, and so on, which I did not touch in this article. I just wanted to focus on the bigger issue of vulnerability to the cyber war that is going on around the world.

Changiz Sadr, P.Eng, FEC (Fellow of Engineers Canada), CISSP

September 6, 2022??