Tripwire Industrial Visibility for Water Utilities

A U.S.-based water utility charged with delivering a safe, reliable supply of water to more than two million residents across several counties was upgrading its IT infrastructure and modernizing its IT security architecture. The time was right to assess and enhance security across their expansive and growing operational technology (OT) environment—which includes hundreds of miles of pipeline and more than 20 physically dispersed water facilities, including pumping stations, water treatment plants, and storage and distribution systems throughout the region.

1. Lack of asset visibility: Water utilities are inherently geographically dispersed with facilities and devices located across the area they serve. The large physical footprint combined with the company’s rapidly growing infrastructure to support population and business growth in the region, resulted in inconsistent documentation of OT assets and lack of full visibility into the OT environment to detect potential threats and vulnerabilities and mitigate risk.
2. Compliance with new regulations: Under America’s Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA), utilities that provide drinking water must conduct risk and resilience assessments and revise emergency response plans. These changes require a detailed understanding of their OT network in order to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deadline in 2020. The water provider needed additional visibility and data to comply with the new mandate.

• The water supplier deployed the underlying technology included in Tripwire Industrial Visibility on top of its existing infrastructure and utilized the following components:
• The underlying technology included in Tripwire Industrial Visibility Threat Detection Console for full spectrum OT visibility, continuous security monitoring, and real-time risk insights with zero impact to operational processes and underlying devices.
• The underlying technology included in Tripwire Industrial Visibility Management Hub to simplify management at scale, consolidating data and providing a unified view of assets, activities, and alerts across multiple sites. The solution also integrates seamlessly with the company’s new IT security infrastructure they had recently deployed.

• Full visibility and immediate profiling of all assets across the company’s expansive OT environment. The IT security, network and OT teams now have granular details of all assets, sessions, processes, and corresponding risk levels, to identify threats and vulnerabilities in the OT network to mitigate risk and assure continued operations of critical processes.
• Compliance with the AIWA mandate. The water utility was able to submit to the EPA by the deadline. The solution gave them the tools necessary to conduct the appropriate risk and resilience assessment according to the new requirement.
• Optimization of IT security, network, and OT teams. The solution integrates with the company’s ecosystem of OT and IT systems and workflows, so all teams can use the it to strengthen security—lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) while maximizing return on investment (ROI).