Overview
Utility and Power Company Outlook
The Complexity of the Evolving Utility Ecosystem
Transformations are widespread in the Utility industry. They are delivering digital transformations to Industry 4.0 with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI); implementing renewable clean energy through solar and wind power initiatives; modernizing the aging grid infrastructure with migrations to hybrid cloud infrastructure; and helping enterprises improve costs and services with migrations to private 5G/LTE environments. Simultaneously, advancements in intelligent digital technologies with smart sensors, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled tools and technologies are helping crews and power companies improve service delivery and routine maintenance.
In these highly connected, complex OT environments, reliability is not just about uptime; it is about deterministic performance and even the smallest slowdowns or major disruptions can snowball into power disruptions and safety incidents. That same connectivity expands the attack surface, making cybersecurity gaps and network or application performance issues real threats to operational resilience.
Utilities need end-to-end security and performance observability to “keep the lights on,” maintain operations, and support resilience as digital initiatives grow.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
Manage Risk and Performance in Always-on Power Companies
Lack of Comprehensive End-to-End Visibility
As digital transformations accelerate, legacy point tools lag in scope and scale. Gaps in IT and OT network visibility slows troubleshooting, expands outages, and delays issues resolution across substations, networks, and applications.
Expanded Attack Surfaces Increase Risks
Cyber-attacks increase security risks to power production and distribution. As OT systems increasingly connect to enterprise IT and public cloud, they create additional paths for exploitation and increase operational risk.
Costly Reactive Troubleshooting in Downtime-Intolerant Environments
Unplanned downtime brings financial risks to utilities, causing power outages, increasing maintenance demands, and eroding revenue. Minor network or application performance degradations can be just as damaging as full outages.
Business Continuity Throughout Digital Transformations to Industry 4.0
Expensive Industry 4.0 initiatives falter when networks, OT/IT environments, or migration strategies aren’t ready. Lack of consistent visibility before, during, and after transformations, risk project delays, unexpected costs, and business continuity disruptions.
Quality User Experience in Contact Centers
Distributed voice and digital contact centers lack observability, putting user experience at risk when customers call for new services, payment processing, or report service disruptions.
Outcomes that Matter
What Manufacturers Gain with Visibility and Protection Across Modern Environments
Avoid or Reduce Costly Power Outages
IT teams can quickly identify and resolve issues network-wide, for any application, with actionable insights that reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve resilience, and protect power continuity.
Reduce the Financial Impact of Cyberattacks
With rapid detection and response across IT and OT environments, IT can reduce the risk of lateral movement and prevent operational disruption.
Enable Safe Digital Transformation to Industry 4.0
With continuous monitoring of performance, availability, and security, utilities can scale digital transformation confidently and minimize operational risk.
Eliminate Tool Sprawl and Reduce Licensing Costs
Consolidating into a single, vendor-agnostic, end-to-end observability solution improves uptime, reduces operational risk across substations and hybrid cloud, and lowers licensing and management costs.
Protect Contact Center Availability and User Experience
Observability across voice, video, and contact centers keeps calls connected and agent / customer experience high even during peak demand.
Use Cases
Observability and Security Insights for Energy / Utility Companies
Power companies and utility organizations using NETSCOUT improve operational resilience, reduce risk, and help improve the success of their digital initiatives.
What Our Customers Are Saying
“NETSCOUT is the real deal, helping simplify troubleshooting of complex applications for me and my team. Their best-of-breed service assurance platform improves the visibility we need in the network infrastructure and allows us to do protocol analysis, monitor remote site performance, and effectively troubleshoot mission-critical applications.”
– Network Engineer, Large Enterprise Energy & Utilities Company
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What Utility / Power company IT applications need to be included in proactive observability strategies?
Application performance from a network vantage point provides holistic insights into application behavior, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact latency and loss. This is particularly important for utility IT applications like ERP, CRM, cloud services, and collaboration tools, that are critical in supporting customer service and business operations. These are just some of the over 1,000 applications NETSCOUT supports. By correlating application service activity in real-time with enterprise-wide views, IT teams gain an accurate understanding of application performance and user experience for faster root-cause identification, reduced service restoration times, and lower MTTR.
What Utility / Power Company OT applications should to be part of proactive observability processes?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into OT application behavior, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, and packet loss. This is critically important for manufacturing OT applications like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3), Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and automated power production systems.
How Can NETSCOUT help Power Companies through the Energy 4.0 adoption and migration?
Energy 4.0 is driving power companies to increasingly invest in digital technologies, renewable generation, production of clean energy through solar and wind installation, and distributed infrastructure – all of which needs strong observability and cybersecurity protection. NETSCOUT supports observability at remote substations, energy distribution facilities, and renewable generation sites like wind and solar farms. nGenius solutions provide consistent visibility before, during, and after Energy 4.0 transformations to help power companies avoid project delays, unexpected costs, and business continuity disruptions.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of critical energy company OT application differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It recognizes over a thousand applications “out-of-the-box,” including critical manufacturing OT applications including SCADA, DNP3, and GOOSE, as well as provides flexible configuration options to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in manufacturing operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream, which provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. It gives organizations insights into real-time network behavior to identify lateral movement and control gaps across hybrid environments.
