March Technical Talk - Keeping Our Utilities Safe

The ISA Calgary Section invites you to our March Technical Talk, Keeping our Utilities Safe. Join us virtually the evening of Tuesday, March 30 to hear from Roland Plett of Cisco... are you ready for the next big thing?

Presentation Overview

Every security presentation must start with scary slides about relevant subject matter that's been hacked. This presentation will be no different! The important part is to learn from failures, understand what happened and how to prevent it.

Standards organizations like NERC have put best practices in place to address these security threats and this talk will explain some of that. There are also some interesting pressures on the traditional Purdue security model that we’ll explore as well. For example, there are significant benefits in cloud based artificial intelligence that don’t easily co-exist with the Purdue model - What's the work around? Can we modify? Finally, we'll look at practical examples of how to make your environment more secure (if you’ve already done "the basics" there are a few ways to improve on these as well).

“We're very pleased to welcome Roland as our speaker; he's definitely a go-to expert when it comes to keeping our utilities safe. ” – Jeff Brown, ISA Calgary Section Cybersecurity Lead

Speaker Bio

Roland Plett leads the utility solutions practice at Cisco Systems Canada out of Calgary, AB. He brings together Cisco products and partners to solve challenges in the utility industry. He loves moving data from the dirtiest and most hazardous environments on earth to operator screens and business applications. Over the last 25 years Roland has been an active part of the data networking industry including 8 years at Bell Canada and 13 years at Cisco Systems.

In the last 5 years Roland has participated in multiple industrial network designs for energy and mining customers across western Canada. His most significant challenges have been designing converged wireless solutions for modern utility grids and providing unique levels of service to a variety of diverse systems while achieving a high security posture.