Security as a Service for Utilities

Client

Louisville Water Company has been providing safe, high-quality drinking water to the Louisville Metro area since 1860. Louisville Water serves nearly one million customers in Louisville and across 6 neighboring counties. 

Their water, called Louisville pure tap, won the award for “best-tasting tap in America” from the American Water Works Association in 2008. Louisville Water’s mission is to keep delivering excellent water and service and to earn customer trust. 

Challenge

Like many organizations, Louisville Water had security roles and initiatives that were hard to staff and deliver because security expertise was in high demand and short supply. This was a common utilities cybersecurity problem. Louisville Water has an advanced IT architecture and is charged with protecting critical public infrastructure. That makes it an attractive target for nation-state actors who might want to sabotage or extort a vital public utility. Therefore, Louisville Water’s security posture is often audited by regulatory agencies. 

With millions of customer records and employee data, Louisville Water is often targeted by everyday criminals who seek access. Louisville Water has made major investments in tools and apps to protect the business. Like many organizations, it saw the need to invest in technology that increases visibility and forensics, including processes and personnel to improve mean-time to fix. As a result, Louisville Water decided to focus its efforts on controls, apps, and processes that provide visibility and alerting when attacks happen, as well as forensics for root-cause analysis. 

Solution

Volta set up a Software as a Service model for security and network devices in Louisville Water’s environment by implementing Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security and Network Device Management (SDM), a Risk Assessment System (VAS), and a 24x7x365 Security Operations Center (SOC). Volta has become an extension of Louisville Water’s team and routinely works with IT architects in storage, compute/sysadmin, application development, database administration, and networking to gather visibility and provide security guidance based on agreed methods of procedure. 

Implement

• Install and configure Incinga, OpenVAS, ElasticStack, and SIEM SaaS in Louisville Water’s environment. 
• Provision all security and network devices for monitoring in Incinga. 
• Conduct monthly risk assessments (VA) and address VA-derived gaps. 
• Devise and document workflows. 
• Provide nonstop monitoring and security management of Linux servers. 
• Provide agent-based solutions for servers and desktops to feed monitoring. 
• Provide training and awareness to users and administrators. 

Deliver

• Device and policy configuration for all security assets. 
• Security dashboards for failed logins, scanning, recon, connection and bandwidth anomalies, malware infections, intrusion prevention, signature matches, C&C activity, lateral spread behaviors, DNS. 
• Management dashboards to monitor device health by CPU and memory, configuration changes, reboots, system up/down, link up/down. 
• Web policy and email policy violations reporting. 

Results

Since engaging Volta to implement managed services for security and network devices, Louisville Water has experienced a 40% cost reduction, an improved security posture, and increased operating effectiveness. 

Furthermore, Volta’s security practice established a method and an economy of scale that spared Louisville Water the cost of buying extra tools and licenses or training people to deploy and run them. 

This managed service freed Louisville Water staff to focus on more strategic departmental objectives and new business initiatives. 

In conclusion, Louisville Water Company has improved the protection of its assets and data through work with Volta. It also has more insight into the current state of its environment.  Louisville Water now has a more effective security setup at a lower cost.  It has better visibility, alerts, event management, monthly risk assessments, and nonstop 24x7x365 monitoring. All of this was installed and is always supported by Volta. 

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