ISO 27001: A Powerful Utility Player For The Utilities

By Stratton Nicolaides, Chairman and CEO of Numerex (*)

When PricewaterhouseCoopers and CIO Magazine conducted their most recent annual Global State of Information Security® study in the spring of 2008 (2008 GSIS), the result for the utility industry was the classic good news/bad news story. While utilities have made significant strides in improving the state of information security throughout their operations, there still exists a significant gap between the confidence utility executives have as to the effectiveness of their systems and the actual audit or measurement of security policies. And while, in the 2008 GSIS survey, utilities surpassed the cross-industry average for having cellular and wireless security standards in place, the total number showed less than half of all utilities had implemented these key standards.

(*) This White Paper is adapted from a presentation given at the Remote 2008 Conference & Expo - SCADA, Device Networking, M2M, Wireless Technology, Onsite Power and Security for Remote Sites – held in Atlanta, GA, November 5-6, 2008 - Atlanta, GA, February 27, 2009.