Cybersecurity and Architecture

According to industry reports, there were on average slightly over 1K cyberattacks on utilities in the first eight months of 2024, compared to less than 700 in 2023. A coordinated attack on legacy systems, for which regular maintenance and upgrades are not accessible, could cause widespread disruptions, including potential blackouts, water treatment plant failures, and transportation network breakdowns. These attacks could also impact communication systems, making it difficult to coordinate emergency responses. Ever-increasing investment requirements in IT infrastructure and onsite IT experts are challenging the feasibility of exclusively on-premises systems. According to Gartner, IT expenses are rising by ~10% or more year over year.

Part of our commitment to innovation in all we do, our partnership with Microsoft Azure has enabled us to build on decades of domain-specific knowledge while listening to utilities’ biggest challenges with previous generations of our solution. Those challenges were often open-ended customizations that prevented upgrades and left systems vulnerable to cyberattacks.

We’ve solved those problems by redesigning ArcFM as a hybrid-cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, offering you all the benefits of the cloud while enabling you to maintain control of your GIS enterprise data just as you would with a strictly on-premises system.

Our new hybrid architecture creates two seamless environments – one that is customer-managed and one that is managed by Schneider Electric in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Similar to our Classic 10.x solution, your Enterprise GIS and all its associated data, as well as ArcFM applications running on your devices, remain in your customer-managed environment. All administrative ArcFM Services reside in the SE–managed Microsoft Azure environment. This includes ArcFM application configuration that tailors ArcFM features to serve your specific needs. Job coordination tasks move jobs between applications and users, which can then be customized to reflect your specific workflows. All of this orchestration is now in the Cloud with the XI series, and the benefits are vast:

1. Our software is easier to deploy: By leveraging Cloud Services, we’ve significantly reduced adoption time.

2. Our software is easier to enhance: The evolution of ArcFM’s Workflow Studio, in addition to APIs and extensibility points, provides an enhancement framework for tailoring the XI solution to your needs. This framework can substantially reduce customization costs.

3. Our software is easier to upgrade: We have reduced the frequency of upgrades and security patches, from efforts that previously took weeks or even months, down to mere hours. An average of two releases per year provides instant access to countless new features and critical security patches.

4. Our software is easier to integrate: With a productized integration framework, core business and operations systems are easily incorporated into ArcFM apps.

5. Our software can lower your overall cost of ownership: A hybrid cloud solution drastically reduces infrastructure costs and the investment in staff who need to maintain it, thereby reducing costs in the thousands over the lifetime of ownership.

6. Our software offers an enhanced security framework: Microsoft Azure understands the resources required to defend against rising cybersecurity threats. They invest more than $5 billion annually and have more than 20,000 security experts analyzing millions of signals to mitigate for attacks. To date, there isn’t a utility in the world that can invest that much and resources, and now the ArcFM XI series offers all of that to you.

7. Our software helps us to support your solution in near-real time. Our specialized teams are alerted when performance issues arise so we can deploy fixes, frequently before customers are aware.