North American Energy Alliance to Protect SCADA Systems with Network Encryption

Jan. 5, 2011
The North American Energy Alliance has deployed the Advanced IPSec Network Encryption Solution as part of its NERC compliance process.

The North American Energy Alliance has deployed the Advanced IPSec Network Encryption Solution from CipherOptics as part of its NERC compliance process.

NAEA owns a portfolio of 1755 MW of clean and efficient electricity-producing power stations located in the Northeastern United States.

"We had a need to encrypt our SCADA information to comply with the current North American Electric Reliability Corporation NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection guidelines,” said Dominick Birolin, network engineer for NAEA. "We were looking for a solution that could protect our critical cyber assets and meet our unique deployment requirements when we found CipherOptics.

"Latency was our biggest concern as we looked to protect our control data. Once we began evaluating the various options for encrypting our data, we found that point-to-point IPSec tunnels would have had a negative impact on network performance and latency," added Birolin. "CipherOptics was able to provide us with an advanced Layer 2 Encryption solution that met our security requirements without imposing the latency restrictions of IPSec tunnels."

CipherOptics protects sensitive information for a growing number of utility and critical infrastructure providers. Capable of protecting data over any Layer 2, Layer 3, or Layer 4 network, CipherOptics solutions allow companies to encrypt data with standards-based solutions that eliminate the need for IPSec tunnels or infrastructure modifications. With CipherOptics, companies can easily meet the demands for increased network security while maintaining the any-to-any low latency performance required by today's communication and business processing applications.

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