RSAC 2024: Join us at the Claroty Beats Hub.
Learn More
Claroty Toggle Search

Blog / 3 min read

Cepel Certification Guarantees Claroty Compatibility for Brazilian Electric Companies

Italo Calvano
/ November 2nd, 2020

As part of our efforts to align our solutions with research institutions around the world, we are excited to share that Claroty has been certified by Cepel, the largest electrical energy research center in South America. With this certification, Claroty is able to guarantee compatibility with all companies in the Brazilian electric utilities market, as well as the SAGE open energy management system and its protocols, which were developed by Cepel. As such, Brazilian electric utilities companies can rest assured The Claroty Platform is 100% compatible with the SCADA and proprietary protocols used by their operational technology (OT).

Based in Rio de Janeiro, Cepel's mission is to develop and deploy innovative, sustainable technology solutions that deliver reliable and efficient power generation, transmission, and distribution. To support its research activities, Cepel operates a complex of 34 laboratories — including the largest high-voltage and high-power laboratories in the Southern Hemisphere.

To attain this certification, Claroty underwent a lengthy homologation process involving several intensive evaluations. To assess Claroty's technological capabilities, the Cepel team created a complex architecture comprising The Claroty Platform, the SAGE platform, and networking equipment — along with 104, DNP, SNMP, ICCP 61850, and C37.118 simulators. After this architecture was created, simulations of digital events and analog measures were executed by Cepel researchers. The results of this testing verified The Claroty Platform's ability to monitor SAGE and its proprietary protocols without issues.

For this certification, the SAGE database was configured as SCADA in order to engage in real-time communications with simulator machines in the IEC 60870-5-104, IEC 61850, DNP, IEC 60870-6 (ICCP), SNMP, and C37.118 ICS protocols.

The diagram above shows the equipment configuration used by Cepel during its evaluation of The Claroty Platform.

Worldwide, electric utilities providers are undergoing rapid digital transformation, which has inadvertently increased the cyber risk exposure of power grids. Companies in the power generation and transmission business have considerable redundancy built into their OT. While this redundancy helps utilities providers withstand sudden component failures, it can also exacerbate certain risks by adding additional noise to the complexity of a plant's OT network.

Limited visibility into intricate, geographically dispersed OT environments — along with inadequate security controls — makes it exceedingly difficult for electric utilities providers to offset the additional cyber risk posed by digital transformation. Fortunately, the following solutions — which comprise The Claroty Platform — have officially been certified by Cepel in accordance with its homologation process, helping Brazilian electric utilities companies monitor and defend the OT they rely on to deliver power to their customers:

  • Continuous Threat Detection (CTD): Delivers full-spectrum IoT and OT visibility, continuous security monitoring, and real-time risk insights with zero impact to operational processes and underlying devices.

  • Secure Remote Access (SRA): Safeguards OT networks from threats introduced via unmanaged and unmonitored access by remote users, including employees and third-party vendors.

  • Enterprise Management Console: Simplifies management at scale, consolidating data from Claroty products and providing a unified view of assets, activities, and alerts across multiple sites.

While the Cepel certification applies specifically to companies in the Brazilian power utilities sector, it broadly attests to the suitability of The Claroty Platform for protecting critical infrastructure, as well as its ability to hold up under extensive third-party vetting and testing. Furthermore, Claroty's compatibility with SAGE and its proprietary protocols serves as yet another example of our industry-leading breadth and depth of OT protocol coverage.

To learn more about how Claroty helps secure OT for power generation, download our electric utilities case study. For more information about Claroty's Cepel certification, contact us.

Electric Utilities
Stay in the know

Get the Claroty Newsletter

Featured Articles

Interested in learning about Claroty's Cybersecurity Solutions?

Claroty
LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Facebook