Mining the Corporate Data Domain Safely and Securely Across the Enterprise

Part 4: Secure Data Access

Preserving the Security Perimeter

Pegasus has shown it can reliably collect, store and provide all of the SCADA data to its internal users, so Entergy is now in the process of retiring all of the old data gathering applications from the EMS. In the future, the system will also provide information to all authorized T&D users outside of the operations arena as well via the typical corporate desktop. This helps Entergy meet the NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) guidelines by providing a clear separation (just two logical connections) between critical and non-critical assets.

Access to the Data Store

In addition to a desktop client and the ability to move data from the client to other desktop applications like Microsoft Access and Excel, all data is available to other programs using a simple application programming interface (API). Bulk exports of data are supported by a dedicated Exporter application that uses this API. The Exporter allows the user to gather, for example, all megawatt readings from a region for a year with a simple command script. The API is also used by data mining applications that operate on the data store.

Application Development Standards

Application development used modern tools and techniques, with its processes programmed to take advantage of new multi-core CPU technologies. The system is very stable, scalable, and shows excellent performance with over one trillion records on-line. As the on-line database grows, the data retrieval time remains constant – a feature that required extensive effort to design and implement but that is invaluable in such a dynamic data environment.