A leading European electric distribution operator strengthened OT cybersecurity across its grid infrastructure, improved compliance with CIS Controls and NIS Directive requirements, and gained complete operational asset visibility using Industrial Defender.
The result was not just improved reporting.
It was operational confidence.
With Industrial Defender, the organization transitioned from fragmented visibility and manual processes to continuous monitoring, automated asset discovery, configuration management, and defensible cybersecurity compliance across its operational technology environment.
For critical infrastructure operators, cybersecurity is no longer just about detection. It is about understanding every asset, every change, and every risk across the operational environment.
This case study shows how Industrial Defender helped a major European utility achieve exactly that.
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After implementing the Industrial Defender platform, the utility gained:
The organization established a single source of truth across operational assets, including servers, firewalls, control systems, and workstations. This centralized visibility allowed cybersecurity teams to identify risks faster and reduce blind spots across their environment.
Industrial Defender enabled automated asset inventory discovery, ensuring that new devices and changes were continuously tracked without manual intervention.
This capability helped the organization:
The utility implemented automated configuration monitoring to detect:
This reduced risk exposure and improved operational discipline across critical systems.
Industrial Defender provided built-in reporting aligned to:
This enabled the utility to continuously monitor compliance and demonstrate regulatory alignment with confidence.
The organization gained visibility into:
These insights strengthened cybersecurity posture and improved response capabilities.
The Europe-based electric distribution operator serves approximately 8 million customers across 3.9 million homes and businesses. Its infrastructure spans 25,000 square kilometres and includes more than 63,000 substations and approximately 96,000 kilometres of grid infrastructure.
As part of a broader digital transformation initiative, the organization sought to modernize operations and improve grid reliability. However, increased digitalization introduced new cybersecurity risks.
The operator’s strategic priorities included:
To achieve these goals, the organization needed a stronger foundation for operational technology cybersecurity.
The utility defined three primary objectives:
The organization wanted to extract value from operational data and improve decision-making across the grid.
This means the organization moves beyond simply collecting operational data to actively using it to understand risk, performance, and system reliability across the grid.
Rather than reacting after disruptions or vulnerabilities emerge, the utility identifies patterns, detects changes early, and makes informed decisions based on real-time operational insight. In practice, this enables more confident, data-driven decision-making across cybersecurity and operations, grounded in continuously validated information rather than assumptions.
The utility aimed to align cybersecurity practices across operational and information technology environments.
It means the organization operates with a consistent cybersecurity approach across both operational technology and information technology environments, eliminating gaps that can exist between the two.
Instead of managing OT and IT as separate domains with different standards and visibility, the utility gains a unified view of assets, risks, and security controls across the entire environment. In practice, this strengthens overall security posture, improves coordination between teams, and ensures that threats and vulnerabilities are identified and addressed before they can impact operations.
The organization needed open APIs and data sharing capabilities to support modernization initiatives.
Meeting these objectives required a platform capable of delivering deep asset visibility, monitoring, and compliance reporting.
This means the organization can securely share and integrate operational data with external partners, systems, and platforms without losing control or visibility. Instead of data being siloed within individual systems, the utility enables a more connected ecosystem where information flows to support grid modernization, analytics, and operational coordination.
This allows the organization to maintain confidence that all shared data is accurate, monitored, and aligned with cybersecurity and compliance requirements.
The operator had been using Industrial Defender since 2012 to monitor components of its Advanced Distribution Management System. This included more than 200 assets across control centers, data centers, and regional distribution operations.
However, as cybersecurity requirements increased, the organization expanded to the full Industrial Defender platform.
Industrial Defender stood out for several reasons:
Industrial Defender provides deep asset intelligence across operational environments, enabling utilities to identify risks and manage cybersecurity proactively.
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The platform includes out-of-the-box reporting aligned to major cybersecurity frameworks, including CIS Controls and NIS Directive requirements.
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Industrial Defender monitors configuration changes, software updates, and user activity across critical infrastructure.
Industrial Defender engineers provided:
This helped the organization accelerate deployment and maximize value.
Industrial Defender integrated with the utility’s SIEM environment, allowing correlation between OT asset intelligence and broader cybersecurity operations.
This means the organization connects OT asset intelligence with its broader security operations, creating a more complete view of risk across the environment. Instead of OT and IT security data existing in isolation, the utility correlates events, alerts, and asset context to better understand what is happening and why it matters.
This improves threat detection, reduces response time, and enables more informed decision-making across the entire cybersecurity program.
Electric utilities face increasing cybersecurity threats alongside rapid grid modernization.
Key challenges include:
Industrial Defender addresses these challenges by providing:
This allows utilities to move from reactive cybersecurity to proactive risk management.
This means the organization gains a clear, continuous understanding of what is happening across its OT environment, instead of relying on fragmented data and delayed insights.
Rather than reacting to incidents after they occur, the utility identifies risks earlier, understands their impact, and takes action before they affect operations or compliance.
This shifts cybersecurity from a reactive cost center into a proactive capability that protects uptime, reduces risk, and gives leadership confidence that the grid is operating securely and as expected.
The utility will also benefit from Industrial Defender’s commitment to meeting the evolving regulatory landscape across the NERC CIP landscape.
The NERC CIP-015 Compliance Management
The dashboard highlighted in this video serves as a centralized hub for meeting the internal reporting and monitoring requirements of NERC CIP-015 (which focuses on cybersecurity supply chain risk management).
It allows organizations to:
Asset Risk Assessment
The "Risk Overview" section provides a high-level visual summary of the environment's security posture.
Risk Categorization: Assets are automatically categorized into three risk levels based on their current security state:
Drill-Down Capabilities: Users can filter assets by Group, Type, Status, Location, and OS Type to identify exactly where vulnerabilities exist within the infrastructure.
Baseline Exceptions Monitoring
A critical feature of the dashboard is its ability to track "Baseline Exceptions"—deviations from a "known good" state. The dashboard monitors several specific categories:
Set up some time with one of our experts to see how our OT cyber risk management platform can help solve your unique security needs. Our solution can help you with:
