As a co-host city for 2008 Beijing Olympics, Shanghai worked together with Beijing in its elaborate preparation for a successful Olympics. The fundamental power guarantee provided by Shanghai Power is vital for the preparation. Under a power consumption boom in the summer, in order to ensure a secure and stable power supply during the Games, Shanghai Power worked out a power supply master plan that focused on the operational security of large grids and the supply security of facilities related to the Games and key users.
Renovation of existing operation and network to improve the security level of power system is one of the important sections in the master plan. After prudent appraisal, Shanghai Power finally selected Venusense USG (Unified Security Gateway) (UTM) to safeguard the power dispatch network.
1. Low latency ensuring real-time transmission of data
Shanghai Electric Power Co. Ltd is a mega enterprise in power transmission, distribution, and sales as well as responsible for ensuring power supply of whole administrative district of Shanghai.
Power dispatch network is the most important part in secondary power system, mainly including dispatch automation system SCADA/EMS, power plant auto monitoring system, substation automation system, relay protection system, fault recorder information management system, and energy metering system, etc. These systems require the collection of real-time operational data of power equipment for real-time monitoring of the same. Therefore, real-time transmission of data is vital to the operation of the network.
Venusense UTM adopts high performance hardware architecture and unified software design to perform various security protection functions while ensuring the high performance and low latency of the system. Its small packet latency is only several μs when virus detecting and intrusion protection are enabled. Such latency is sufficient to meet the requirements of power dispatch network.
2. Unified engine provides more effective security protection
In the traditional solutions for power dispatch system, firewall is used to control access to network layer. However, firewall is unable to handle high level threats. In order to identify intrusions and threats into the network in time, intrusion detection system (IDS) is often deployed in the power dispatch system. The IDS deployed can provide system administrator with more information on the traffic of whole network and with alarm on identified network intrusion behavior. However, as IDS is deployed on the bypass for performing its major function of risk management rather than for actively protecting against the attacks identified, online real-time protection product is required to perform the protecting function.
As a basic functional module of Venusense UTM, Firewall can perform perfectly the functions of status detection and access control. In addition, several advanced security features like Gateway Antivirus, Intrusion Protection System (IPS), and Anti-Dos are also included in Venusense UTM. For example, in terms of IPS, Venusense UTM can provide effective protection against buffer overflow attacks, backdoor Trojans, attacks on security vulnerability, worm viruses, database attacks, and other intrusions as well as block those intrusions in real-time to improve security.
3.Centralized management center ensuring the management of large scale deployment
In this project, Venusense UTM successfully deployed in Shanghai power dispatch center and about 20 of its subordinate local, regional, and high voltage dispatch sites. In such a large scale deployment, it used to be difficult to monitor the operation of equipment in each site. However, with Venusense UTM centralized management center, monitoring of these equipment is no longer a problem.
Centralized management center of Venusense UTM performs the functions of centralized configuration, real-time monitoring, and unified update on equipment group. The centralized configuration function makes it easy for administrator to distribute unified security strategies to equipment within same group. With real-time monitoring, administrator can obtain information on the operation of Venusense in various local and regional dispatch sites as well as details on works performed by the equipment from the central machine room.