Control Centers

Waterfall Security Solutions Unidirectional Security Gateway family of products provides stronger-than-firewalls protections to meet the most demanding SCADA security and industrial control system security requirements for safety-critical and reliability-critical operations in electric industry. Unidirectional Gateway products are deployed throughout all sectors of the industry, securing IT/OT interfaces, substations and transmission control centers all over the world.

Traditional IT security approaches to SCADA security have proven inadequate to the critical security needs of SCADA systems. Firewalls are porous by design, necessitating costly and complex secondary security systems throughout firewall-protected sites. Firewalls permit attacks to enter critical control system networks and intrusion detection, containment and remediation takes time. For all of that time, attackers on the other side of the planet have control of our physical assets, and unlike IT systems, rotating equipment and high-voltage transformers cannot be “restored from backup” when they are damaged by cyber-attacks.

Waterfall Security Solutions is the leader for unidirectional protection of electric sector industrial control systems and SCADA systems, and has more Unidirectional Security Gateway solutions deployed than any other vendor.

The strong security of Unidirectonal Security Gateways is recognized in

• NERC CIP V5 and V6 standards,
• French ANSSI control system security standards,
• NRC 5-71 and NEI 08-09 standards

And many other standards, regulations and best practice guidelines world-wide. In North America in particular, the NERC CIP V5 and V6 standards provide for significant reductions in CIP compliance costs and CIP compliance obligations at unidirectionally-protected sites, thus reflecting the reduced risk to electric system reliability from unidirectionally-protected sites.

Firewalls are inadequate to the protection of reliability-critical sites in the electric sector. Neither physical assets in power plants or substations, nor control system assets are expendable. The bulk electric system will be measurably more reliable when unidirectional security gateways are deployed universally throughout the sector. None of the control systems at electric-sector sites are expendable enough to be protected by firewalls.