Cisco creates smart grid ecosystem, adds security

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) has been one of the most bullish about the smart grid opportunity, forecasting $20 billion in annual revenue by 2013. To achieve this lofty goal, the communications infrastructure provider has signed up a slew of partners and today is enlisting the help of utilities, service providers, vendors and other industry thought leaders. In addition to introducing new grid security services, Cisco today announced the formation of the Cisco Smart Grid Ecosystem and Smart Grid Technical Advisory Board (TAB).

In the past four months since Cisco announced its smart grid vision, it has been focused on adding partners and driving the adoption of IP-based communication standards for the grid. To help in this goal, Cisco has formed a Smart Grid Ecosystem made up of more than 20 of its vendor partners, including systems integrators, technology vendors, power and utility integrators, service providers and Cisco’s own sales vendors. Among the initial announced members are General Electric, Verizon, Oracle, Arcadian Networks, AREVA T&D, Itron and Accenture.

Inbar Lasser-Raab, senior director of network systems at Cisco, noted that IP – with its ability to bring together multiple networks and converge them in a single infrastructure – is fast becoming vital to the success of smart grid deployments. The members will work with Cisco on interoperability testing and migrating to an all-IP infrastructure. The ecosystem’s goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying multivendor smart grid communications infrastructure and ultimately to help Cisco advance its ultimate goal.

“[Cisco’s] goal is to create the overall communication infrastructure for smart grid deployments,” Lasser-Raab said. “All the way from the transmission distribution networks through to the neighborhood networks to smart meter communications is integrated into our network architecture to home and business energy management solutions.”

Cisco also announced today it joined the Zigbee Alliance, in addition to its existing NIST, NERC, IEEE and GridWise Alliance memberships, to drive IP adoption and develop Zigbee Smart Energy II technology and devices. “With the focus on active energy management and the fact that Zigbee is driving wireless connectivity to appliances and devices, it was another milestone towards driving IP across the industry,” Lasser-Raab said.

Cisco works with utilities across the globe including Duke Energy and Austin Energy in the US and Nuon in Amsterdam. Its latest utility partner is Calgary-based power and energy provider Enmax, also announced today. Enmax will be among the first members in Cisco’s newly formed Technical Advisory Board. The TAB model is already instituted in its other lines of business, and the company is extending it to grid work to aggregate, understand and serve its customers’ business needs. Lasser-Raab said Cisco will use the technology-focused forum to seek feedback from its members on what products and solutions Cisco can offer to best serve them.  

The TAB meets four times a year to discuss product roadmaps and strategies. The first meeting is being held this week in Berlin during the Smart Grid Strategies conference and at next week’s Grid Week in DC.

CISCO SECURITY

Cisco also today announced grid security services aimed at delivering a unified approach to help ensure physical security, cyber security and reliability of the electric system – a key concern for smart grid deployments. Lasser-Raab said the security services will allow utilities to address those measures required by regulation and provide infrastructure security for the grid operations, systems, data and assets. Cisco’s services include utility compliance assessment, physical site security vulnerability assessment, grid security architecture design, physical and networking security design and physical and network security deployment.

“Now utilities have those issues of who can access what, and they need to start developing models for secure access to areas that before you could only manually secure, so they obviously focus on physical security and surveillance and alarms,” Lasser-Raab said. “Now they also need to implement those policies into their network systems. We’ve created services that allow them to develop identity management between individuals and systems, as well as devices to themselves.”

On the smart grid, all of this will be done automatically. Rather than sending out a technician to fix a problem, a management system will be in place in the network to do it automatically. Utilities can also build policy-management systems triggered by the network. For example, SCADA, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, requires its own firewall service for intrusion protection. Cisco can offer firewalls specific to those protocols, allowing the utility to better manage access to different information, Lasser-Raab said.