OT CYBERSECURITY – ELECTRIC POWER

Red Trident combines our own advanced tools with leading industry solutions to deliver thorough and efficient asset discovery across your generation, transmission, and distribution footprint. Electric assets are spread across plants, substations, and thousands of pole-top and pad-mount devices, which makes visiting every one of them slow and expensive. That’s why we leverage existing documentation and any available data you have – relay settings files, substation one-lines, EMS and DMS databases, historian tags – to reduce travel and disruption.

Where passive collection is the only safe option, we use it. Energized substations and running units are not places to experiment with aggressive scanning, and we treat them accordingly. Whenever possible we also work directly alongside your relay techs and system operators to fill the gaps, so you gain a complete, accurate picture of your assets quickly and with minimal hassle.

Red Trident offers one of the most effective and affordable risk assessment tools available. Our solution helps us quickly review your business processes and clearly measure risk within your environment.

You will receive an easy-to-read report showing the most likely threats you face, how those threats could impact your business, and how your current security controls protect you. For electric utilities that impact is measured the way you already measure it – load at risk, customers affected, restoration time, and regulatory exposure. We also highlight the dollar value of each control, so you can see how your investment directly lowers your risk. This gives you clear, actionable insights – and helps your team, including your CFO and your rate case, understand exactly how your security spending is making a difference.

NERC CIP is where compliance and real security either reinforce each other or pull in opposite directions. We help make sure it is the first one.

Red Trident supports registered entities across the CIP standards, starting with the question that drives everything else: what is actually in scope. We help you work through CIP-002 asset identification and impact rating, then build outward – Electronic Security Perimeters and access points under CIP-005, systems security management under CIP-007, configuration change management and vulnerability assessments under CIP-010, and physical security under CIP-006. We also help with the supply chain requirements in CIP-013 and the low-impact obligations under CIP-003 that catch a lot of smaller entities off guard.

CIP-015 added internal network security monitoring inside the Electronic Security Perimeter. It became effective in September 2025, with high and medium impact BES Cyber Systems with external routable connectivity required to comply by October 1, 2028 and the remainder by October 1, 2030. That sounds far away, but the work is architectural – sensor placement, span and tap strategy, data retention, and analyst workflow – and it is much cheaper to design in now than to retrofit later. We help you plan it on your schedule rather than the auditor’s.

If you are a municipal or cooperative utility outside the Bulk Electric System, none of this is required of you. We will tell you that plainly, and then help you take the parts that are genuinely worth doing.

The distribution edge is where the grid is changing fastest. Rooftop and community solar, storage, EV charging, and advanced metering all push controllable, communicating devices out past the substation fence and into places the utility does not physically control – and most of them arrive through a vendor, an aggregator, or a customer rather than through your engineering department.

Red Trident has assessed DER and advanced metering equipment on the distribution side, looking at the devices and their communications rather than taking a vendor’s security claims at face value. We have also reviewed and contributed to DER cybersecurity research content through our work with CITES.

What we bring to a distribution utility is device-level and architectural: what these systems actually expose, how their vendor and aggregator connections work, where the trust boundaries really sit, and what happens to your operation when a population of edge devices behaves in a way nobody planned for. If you are building a DER interconnection standard, evaluating an AMI vendor, or trying to understand what a third-party aggregator can reach, that is the conversation we are built for.

Most distribution utilities also sit outside NERC CIP entirely, which means there is no auditor telling you where to start. We help you make those calls on risk instead.

Choosing the right OT cybersecurity controls for electric power is tough – especially when you need solutions that work, survive an audit, and fit your budget. Many utilities come to Red Trident after realizing their current controls are hard to manage or don’t actually protect them as expected.

At Red Trident, we help you make smart choices by explaining the pros and cons of different security options. We use the latest threat intelligence to show you which risks matter most and where controls will have the biggest impact – at the control center, at the substation gateway, or at the unit level. We factor in the constraints you actually live with: protection and control equipment that cannot tolerate latency, maintenance windows that come once a year, vendor support agreements that limit what you can change, and IEEE 1686 capabilities your relays may or may not have. Every utility is unique, so we work with you to build the best plan, then support you during design, factory and site testing, and step-by-step rollout. With Red Trident, you get security controls that truly fit your needs.

Building a strong OT cybersecurity program can be overwhelming, with so many options and questions to consider. Many organizations jump into technical solutions that don’t last or lack a clear plan to truly reduce risk. Red Trident helps you cut through this confusion by taking a “systems of systems” approach – making sure every solution works together, fits your goals, and adds real value to your operations.

Our modular method breaks down the process into six clear steps:

1. Standards Selection – Choose the right cybersecurity framework for your needs, like NERC CIP, NIST 800-82, IEC-62443, DOE C2M2 or a custom mix.
2. Risk Management Approach – Integrate your existing risk processes, or let us introduce proven industry methods such as FAIR or OCTAVE.
3. Key Roles and Players – Identify and engage the right people early, making sure the program fits operations, engineering, and leadership – not just compliance.
4. Program Development – Guide you through building a clear, effective program that your entire team understands and supports.
5. Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) – Track gaps and future improvements so you can address them over time.
6. Continuous Improvement and Monitoring – Keep your program active and useful, supporting regular testing, incident response, and ongoing security needs.

Red Trident customizes every OT cybersecurity program to your size, business goals, and compliance needs, whether regulatory or internal. Our focus is building lasting protections that keep the power flowing – not just checking boxes for an audit. With us, you get a practical, focused plan that manages real risk and helps your team stay secure as you grow.

Whether you have a robust cybersecurity program or are just getting started, Red Trident can be your last line of defense when things go wrong. Our Incident Response service is here to help you prepare and react. We run tabletop exercises to test your readiness – including the scenarios that matter most to a utility, like losing visibility at the control center or being forced to move to manual operations – help you build a solid response plan, and can step in as your response team if a breach occurs.

We also help you line that plan up with the reporting obligations you already carry, including CIP-008 incident reporting to the E-ISAC. With Red Trident, you’re never alone during a crisis – help is always ready when you need it most.