Pike Research (News - Alert) recently announced that they have forecasted that by the year 2018, all utility investment in cyber security for industrial control systems will total about $4.1 billion. In the past, electrical grids were controlled by electromechanical and pneumatic devices. All that has changed now; they are now being controlled by computers in a grid either running Windows or Linux. They use the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate among themselves and with other grids. Backbones to grid operations like supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices use both Wireless and Bluetooth capabilities. According to the report new investments have to be made in cyber security for industrial control systems (ICS) that will face risks to the electrical grid. Between the year 2011 and 2018, cleantech market intelligence predicts that a total of $4.1 billion will be spent toward cyber security.

In a release, Pike Research senior analyst Bob Lockhart said, “The smart grid changes everything, but when it comes to cyber security issues, much of the story remains the same. Integrating information technology into a power grid presents enormous potential to deliver energy more efficiently and profitably, but also brings inherent risks in terms of security vulnerabilities. The discovery of the Stuxnet worm in 2010 shone a bright light on the fragility of industrial control systems such as SCADA, and has created a new urgency among security vendors and utility managers alike. Nearly overnight, ICS security went from being a non-issue to being critical.”

The security analyst also predicts that major investments will go towards control consoles and systems, telecommunications security, and human-machine interfaces. Key grid operations like distributed automation, substation automation, and transmission upgrades are enhanced with the ICS security. Pike Research’s analysis also predicts that globally smart grid in not uniformly deployed and hence there might be changes and fine-tuning done for individual cases. So some technology upgrades needs to be addressed in many ways globally. They also predict that ICS security investments will be increase uniformly for the next seven years.

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