Last week I attended, presented and tweeted at the Dept of Energy Cybersecurity For Energy Delivery Systems Peer Review. The idea is DoE funds all these research projects, and they would like a group of owner operators and other industry guru’s to help determine if the projects will help secure the energy sector’s critical control systems. Even more important the group provides advice on ways to make it more useful. These can be additional or different technical features, product positioning, commercialization ideas, or anything else to maximize the impact of the research dollars.
Each project is given 15 minutes and a specific format to present in. The panel follows that with 15 minutes of Q&A and comments. They also fill out rating and suggestion forms. I believe the presentations will be available online in the near future.
This is the second time I’ve presented at the event and received helpful advice on Bandolier and Portaledge both times. While it is helpful to Digital Bond, it is even more valuable to some of the more academic minded researchers who have less access to control systems in the real world or limited knowledge about what it takes to productize research.
In fact most of the presenters were non-commercial organizations, academia and national labs. SEL, Enernex and Digital Bond were the only commercial companies that presented – – and perhaps not coincidentally had the projects that were being used the most by community in the form of Bandolier, Lemnos and Hallmark.
There were a couple of other tidbits that I tweeted on, @digitalbond. Most notably there are about 35 cybersecurity bills in Congress now, and the Department of Energy awarded two contracts to create the National Electric Sector Cybersecurity organizations. One is to EnergySec and the other to EPRI. They will have different, complementary responsibilities. EnergySec seemed a natural to win this – – the RFP almost read like a description of EnergySec.