The cyberthreats facing energy and utility companies include the typical threats that plague other industries: data theft, billing fraud, and ransomware. By partnering up with IoE Corp, these companies can feel safe when embedded AI systems run in their own walled garden and are guarded by Security Beyond Cyber.
The main difference between the utility and energy sector are the companies within each industry and the tasks they complete. The utilities sector includes companies involved in producing and distributing utility services to customers. In contrast, the energy sector includes companies engaged in exploring, managing, and producing resources such as water, oil, and electricity.
Both energy and utilities help fuel our everyday lives, from lighting our houses to bringing us clean water. For these sectors, IoT (Internet of Things) and embedded AI (the integration of Artificial Intelligence into various systems and devices) are useful in multiple ways.
Embedded AI can monitor equipment performance, such as turbines or generators, and predict when maintenance is needed, preventing equipment failure and reducing downtime. It can analyze historical data on electricity usage and predict future demand. This helps utilities plan for peak demand periods and optimize their use of resources.
Embedded AI can also, for example, optimize the use of energy resources, such as renewable energy sources, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. To summarize, the significant benefits of embedded AI to the utility sector are improved efficiency, enhanced reliability, and cost savings.
Of course, there are also hazards when companies implement systems of embedded AI. There is both the risk of technical failures, ethical and privacy concerns to be considered. But the most significant and most worrying risks all circle around cybersecurity. This since an eventual breakdown in both the energy and the utilities sector can become fatal to a large number of people.
Using AI in utilities requires collecting, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of sensitive data, making them attractive targets for cyberattacks. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in AI systems to gain unauthorized access to critical infrastructure, causing disruptions and even physical damage.
To dive deeper into cybersecurity's challenges for the energy and utilities sectors, let's take wastewater handling as an example.
Most ordinary people have probably never asked themselves: "Is there a business in waste water?" but of course, there is. In fact, it's growing every year due to environmental issues. It has escalated since World Water Day 2017 when the UN emphasized that wastewater is an "essential component of a circular economy" and called for much more wastewater to start being treated and recycled globally.
Some companies in the waste water industry around the globe use low-temperature biomass dryers, dehumidification heat pump technology dryers, and waste heat sludge dryers, thereby creating innovative hi-tech onsite sludge and wastewater treatment. Wastewater sludge is dried to a solid, making a small dried pellet as the end product sold as a viable commodity and used for beneficial reuse. At the same time, all captured reclaimed water can be used for irrigation, commercial, and industrial water needs.
But a couple of years back, one of these companies in the USA ran into big problems. Their online system got cyberattacked and polluted with ransomware. Because of the enormous costs and difficulties they got exposed to, the company then went offline. Although this decision had many economic drawbacks and gave rise to old kinds of unnecessary expenses, the board reasoned, "Better safe than sorry."
In this case, the main issue for the decision-makers was that cyber security could never be 100 % guaranteed since the WWW (World Wide Web) lies open like a road to any hacker worldwide. The complexity of passwords used becomes irrelevant. A dedicated and skilled hacker will always find a new way to corrupt your data if applying enough effort to it.
As a solution for these far-reaching and severe security threats for both wastewater handling and the rest of the utility sector, IoE Corp has developed Eden. This walled garden system doesn't need to deal with issues of cybersecurity since it's guarded by Security Beyond Cyber (SBC). In other words, Eden offers high-tech embedded AI solutions that work the internet core but isn't at all connected to the WWW, and thereby become impossible to hack from foreign cyberterrorists.
Building layers upon IoE Corps platform Eden, the wastewater company in our example, can create its own informed infrastructure in a safe walled garden protected from intrusion. Instead of centralized solutions such as cloud storage, IoE Corps Eden is a decentralized system that runs through blockchains, letting smart things control each other in a peer-to-peer network not connected to the traditional WWW.
In the future, the wastewater company in our example will therefore be able to draw all the benefits of AI while not having to care about cyber security. The reason for this is that IOE Corps Eden works on SBC.
In the same way, any other company in the energy and utilities sectors can partner up with IoE Corp and get SBC by setting up and connecting their own walled garden to Eden. It's that simple.
Read more: https://ioecorp.com/
To become an IoE Corp partner, apply at: https://partners.ioecorp.com/apply-partner
