Software Defined Networking
SDN technology can enhance any traditional network in a twofold manner:
- by elevating business processes run on the network and
- by strengthening the resilience of the network to cyberthreats. The Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) is of key importance to an economy, as all other domains rely on the availability of electricity. A failure in an EPES network due to a cyberattack, could result in a power outage and have a direct impact on the availability of other services such as water supply, transport, finance, communications and others.
The utilization of SDN technology in an EPES network/infrastructure could deter severe cyberattacks in addition to the business process being enhanced.
What SDN technology offers
- Bandwidth management on demand and in high availability, since in SDN ‘s virtualized environment, network connectivity can be re-arranged dynamically in a user/application fashion or in case of emergency/cyberattack.
- A granular approach which provides centralized management, enabling network intelligence to be logically placed on the SDN controller. User and security policies can be deployed throughout the network.
- High visibility to cyberthreat intelligence due to the nature of the SDN network, thus detection and mitigation software can be applied throughout the network. The centralized controller is able to filter out and block malicious traffic without affecting the rest of the network’s operations.
- Backup and redundancy with no restrictions to legacy / proprietary hardware/software and ease of use as mitigation/control
functions run on more generic x86 architectures. - Open-source technologies that are tested and vulnerabilities quickly patched.