Peaker Plant Case Study

The Situation

A subsidiary of one of the world’s largest multinationals, this energy company owns and operates natural gas fired Peaking Power Plants (i.e., peakers). It supplies electricity when renewable energy sources (wind/solar) aren’t generating enough power to meet local demand.

The company needed a frictionless secure user access solution that could enable employees/contractors/vendors to locally and remotely connect to their Peaker Plant’s critical infrastructure (CI) and industrial control systems (ICS) to be monitored and managed.

The Challenge

The Peaker’s are in remote locations with minimal IT support. The solution needed to be simple to deploy and operate, highly secure, and not impede with the availability of any plant assets, plus provide:

• Support for clientless (i.e., no client applications or browser plug-ins required) mobile devices.
• A Zero-Trust architecture enabling multifactor authentication (MFA) and a ‘least privilege’ approach to authorization.
• Compliance with NERC-CIP, NIST 800-207, and TSA SD02C; and a mandated five-minute SLA for plant start-up.

THE SOLUTION

XONA’s Critical System Gateway (CSG) met this customer’s needs.

• It combines a Zero-Trust Architecture for authentication and authorization in a simple to deploy and administer appliance.
• It meets regulatory compliance and state SLA requirements
• It’s clientless and agentless deployment allows users the flexibility to use tablets and laptop/desktop computers
• It enables frictionless access for all types of users

THE RESULT

Peaker Plant Implementation Reference Architecture