North American Energy Alliance (NAEA) Protecting SCADA Systems with Certes Networks' (formerly CipherOptics) Network Encryption Solution
--CipherOptics solution helping NAEA comply with NERC regulations--
Raleigh, NC, January 5, 2011- CipherOptics, the leader in scalable network encryption, announced today that the North American Energy Alliance has deployed CipherOptics's Advanced IPSec Network Encryption Solution as part of their NERC compliance process. NAEA owns a portfolio of 1755 megawatts of clean and efficient electricity producing power stations located in the Northeastern United States.
"We had a need to encrypt our SCADA information to comply with the current North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) guidelines" said Dominick Birolin, Network Engineer for NAEA. "We were looking for a solution that could protect our critical cyber assets and meet our unique deployment requirements when we found CipherOptics."
"Latency was our biggest concern as we looked to protect our control data. Once we began evaluating the various options for encrypting our data, we found that point-to-point IPSec tunnels would have had a negative impact on network performance and latency" added Birolin. "CipherOptics was able to provide us with an advanced Layer 2 Encryption solution that met our security requirements without imposing the latency restrictions of IPSec tunnels. They are so far ahead of the curve and competition when it comes to ease of use and latency, that the choice was easy for us."
CipherOptics protects sensitive information for a growing number of Utility and Critical Infrastructure Providers, Fortune 100 companies, financial institutions and government agencies around the world. Capable of protecting data over any Layer 2, Layer 3, or Layer 4 network, CipherOptics solutions allows companies to encrypt data with standards based solutions that eliminate the need for IPSec tunnels or infrastructure modifications. With CipherOptics, companies can easily meet the demands for increased network security while maintaining the any-to-any low latency performance required by today's communication and business processing applications.
"Faced with the federal requirement to protect data today and the promise of greater efficiencies with smart grid technologies, utility company executives are looking for solutions that not only meet their current needs, but also help them through the transition to smart grids and advanced networks" says Thomas Gill, CEO of CipherOptics. "Our solution is unique in its ability to protect data on both legacy networks and advance smart grid systems with the same wire speed performance, making it an ideal security investment."
About CipherOptics:
CipherOptics is the leader in scalable security solutions for high performance networks. Our innovative policy and key management solution, along with our wire-speed encryption appliances, can secure any network without changing the underlying infrastructure or application performance. With solutions that are quick to install, easy to manage, and virtually latency free, we offer the highest level of data protection and performance for the lowest total cost.
