Nozomi Networks & SEL partnership to boost cybersecurity

Nozomi Networks and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) have entered into a partnership aimed at providing enhanced cybersecurity solutions and support to critical infrastructure organisations.

This collaboration seeks to assist these organisations in addressing regulatory compliance requirements and ensuring the reliability and availability of their services.

The newly established reseller and software certification partnership focuses on offering greater visibility of network systems and traffic, along with advanced threat detection capabilities specifically tailored for utility and industrial control systems.

Will Edwards, Head of Cyber Services at SEL, explained the significance of the partnership: “Customers depend on SEL to deliver secure solutions and Nozomi Networks’ AI-powered platform helps us achieve this. By giving customers an easy option to integrate the Nozomi Networks platform into SEL Software-Defined Networks, customers have access to advanced solutions designed to strengthen the reliability and availability of their services and help them more easily address a rising sea of regulatory and compliance requirements.”

Critical infrastructure industries face increasing levels of regulation to ensure the services they provide remain consistently available to society. As such, SEL Cyber Services plays a pivotal role in assisting customers with understanding and meeting security requirements such as NERC CIP, IEC 62443, NIST Risk Management Framework, and the SOCI Act. The development and maturation of these standards have elevated the need for internal network security monitoring to secure local area networks against potential cyber threats.

Nozomi Networks' solutions are designed to address these critical requirements effectively by simplifying the process of network monitoring and compliance reporting. The company's advanced tools are intended to facilitate continuous oversight of industrial networks while ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory standards.

SEL Systems are crafted to offer high availability and risk management solutions, especially for power utility infrastructure where 100 per cent uptime is crucial. Modern cyber and physical control systems, often dependent on Ethernet networks, require robust security measures. This is where SEL Cyber Services steps in by providing targeted solutions that assess operational risks and implement scalable networking and cybersecurity measures specifically designed to meet the rigorous demands of critical infrastructure environments.

SEL's OT-Software-Defined Networks (SDN) are uniquely designed to function in harsh environments, automatically denying unauthorised devices and traffic by default. The integration of Nozomi Networks' Vantage cloud-hosted security platform into SEL’s SDNs affords customers comprehensive control over network traffic, obviating the need for additional traffic taps or aggregators, thereby enhancing the efficiency of data aggregation.

Chet Namboodri, Nozomi Networks Senior Vice President of Global Business Development, highlighted the longstanding commitment of SEL to power system reliability: “For more than four decades, SEL has been making electric power safer, more reliable, and more economical worldwide. We share SEL’s mission and are pleased to combine our strengths to ensure that future generations have the means to pursue an increasingly higher quality of life.”

Currently, Nozomi Networks’ solutions are available through SEL, providing customers with access to advanced cybersecurity services and solutions. This new partnership is set to offer critical infrastructure industries the tools they need to enhance their cybersecurity measures and ensure compliance with evolving regulatory standards.