Harnessing Network Observability to Enhance Grid Resilience

Within the utility sector, a lot is changing. Utilities continue to pursue digital transformation, altering the way services are delivered and operations are managed. What hasn’t changed is the criticality of the services provided. These organizations deliver essential resources like natural gas, electricity, and water—services that we as consumers rely upon constantly for our comfort, sustenance, communications, and more.  Consequently, downtime isn't merely an inconvenience, it may very well be an emergency.

As they seek to meet their charters for delivering reliable services, the pressures on utilities continue to mount. Here are just a few of intensifying demands they’re confronting:

• Increasing demand. Across regions and sectors, utilities are seeing surging demand. This is particularly true for operators of the electrical grid, where the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growth in electric vehicle (EV) usage, among many other factors, are fueling significant growth in electricity consumption.
• Aging infrastructure. Utility operators are struggling to support present demand while managing an aging infrastructure. Given the highly distributed nature of their operations, such as transmission lines and substations, these organizations contend with high cost and complexity in applying upgrades and replacements.
• Mounting staffing challenges. Much of the workforce that has been maintaining utility infrastructure has been aging, with an increasing percentage nearing retirement age. The industry requires specialized knowledge to manage older equipment, and many organizations struggle to hire the qualified professionals needed to replace retiring staff.
• Growing technological complexity. To address the intensifying demands for their services, utilities have embarked on significant transformation initiatives. These organizations are expanding their use of AI, software-driven operations, IoT, and more.  By leveraging advanced technologies, utilities are seeing improvements in agility, resilience, and cost efficiency. However, at the same time, operations teams in these organizations are tasked with managing environments that are more sophisticated and complex.
• Expanding compliance and security demands. Utilities are accountable for adhering to ever-more stringent regulatory compliance mandates, security protocols, and privacy policies. Meanwhile, these organizations are being targeted by increasingly persistent and sophisticated cyber attacks. Further, the proliferation of IoT devices and smart grid technologies expands the potential attack surface, making utilities more vulnerable.

The criticality of network connectivity

Today’s utilities must balance growing demands with the need to accelerate innovation, while ensuring the reliability and resilience of their essential services.

As a result of the shifts to IoT, smart grid, AI, and more, network connectivity has emerged as an increasingly critical success factor for utilities. A robust and reliable network now represents the essential backbone for services and operations. To thwart attacks, ensure continuous operations, and maintain compliance, security and technology teams in utilities must be able to detect emerging issues—and address them immediately.

However, while ensuring optimal network connectivity is more vital than ever, it's also never been more difficult. Rapid technology changes and the growing reliance on external cloud services and internet service providers (ISPs) all contribute to increasing network complexity. This evolving technology ecosystem makes comprehensive visibility a significant challenge.

Requirements: The demand for network observability

The changing organizational and operational landscapes within the utility sector make comprehensive network observability critical. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, addressing these key requirements:

• Unified visibility. Network observability solutions bring together data from different distributed sources into a single view. These solutions apply intelligence to that data to help teams gain real-time insights. This is essential for quickly identifying the root cause of network performance issues.
• Cross-cloud, internet, and underlay visibility. The increased reliance on cloud providers, ISPs, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), and other approaches have served to introduce network visibility gaps.  Overcoming these gaps is crucial. Teams need to gain end-to-end visibility into connectivity paths, including when those paths transit domains that aren't managed by internal teams. In SD-WAN environments, it's important to be able to correlate overlay performance with issues that affect the underlay.
• Application experience monitoring. In today’s networks, it is essential to leverage both active and passive monitoring approaches. This is vital for gaining end-to-end visibility into connectivity paths that span hybrid cloud and multi-vendor environments. In this way, administrators can more rapidly identify and resolve issues. Critically, this enables teams to track network performance from the end-user perspective.

Solution: Network Observability by Broadcom

Network Observability by Broadcom gives teams in utilities the capabilities they need to track and optimize the operation of their modern networks. The platform enables teams to gain true observability, bringing together data from different tools and layering intelligence on top of it. By leveraging the platform, teams can get complete visibility of their modern ecosystem, including internally and externally managed networks, public and private clouds, virtual private clouds, ISPs and other third-party providers, and SD-WAN environments.

With its unified, contextualized intelligence and end-to-end coverage, the platform helps teams speed root cause identification, reduce downtime, and enhance grid resilience. The platform helps teams proactively manage and optimize their network for improved service reliability and customer satisfaction.

The platform provides these advantages:

• Powerful insights. Network Observability by Broadcom gives teams a deeper understanding of network behavior. With the platform, teams can track performance trends and distinguish between normal traffic fluctuations and changes that signal an emerging issue. The platform can also help teams spot the abnormal spikes in activity that may indicate a security breach is underway.
• Alarm noise reduction. The platform’s alarm noise reduction ensures teams only receive targeted, actionable insights. Plus, the platform delivers topology views that help teams understand upstream and downstream dependencies, revealing how issues in one area can ripple across the environment.
• Boost operational efficiency. By centralizing intelligence, the platform helps foster more efficient workflows and standardized operating procedures. This helps utilities contend with their workforce limitations. With the platform, teams can employ automation to execute such tasks as triggering alerts, generating tickets, and initiating remediation tasks.
• Speed issue detection and resolution. The platform delivers the timely, actionable insights that enable network operations teams to identify and resolve issues faster.
• Minimize risk of outages. With the platform, administrators can move from reactive to proactive approaches. The platform delivers the predictive insights needed to prevent issues before they cause downtime.

With Network Observability by Broadcom, teams can track performance trends and spot emerging issues.

Conclusion

Technological innovations in the utility sector are introducing unprecedented opportunities—and challenges. For network operations teams in utilities, gaining unified network observability is essential for addressing these challenges. By unleashing the power of Network Observability by Broadcom, these teams can gain the visibility, intelligence, and automation they need. The platform helps these teams ensure the continuous availability of the networks that their critical services are reliant upon.

To learn more, be sure to view our Small Bytes webcast, Achieving True Network Observability for Enhanced Grid Resiliency.