Motivation

Why Cloud?

The energy transition requires and is driving deeper IT/OT convergence and digital innovation. Cloud technology offers cost-effective ways to meet the needs. For example, the use of the cloud for managing the complexity and volume of data at scale from ever-increasing distributed energy resources (DERs) in today’s power grid demand technologies. The situation also calls for an expanded cybersecurity model to protect the grid from the risk of compromise by way of edge devices. It is thus necessary to reinvent the models and toolchains to address such emerging challenges and incorporate the advent of the cloud era to accelerate the problem-solving process.

Part of the challenge is to address the many misconceptions about the cloud that exist and to enable power system community to shift their technical understanding of on-premises settings to include cloud environments and solutions. Cloud embodies more than computing. It is an aggregation of many disruptive technologies such as IoT, AI/ML, HPC, Block Chain and Quantum Computing. The Task Force has made significant efforts to bridge the understanding of the industry operation with the real cloud capabilities. 

Critical Moves by Regulatory Bodies and Government

• In December 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the revised CIP-004-7 and CIP-011-3 standards. The approved revisions modified the CIP requirements for protecting BCSI to provide a path to modern third-party data storage and analysis systems, including cloud technology. These changes allow entities to store, transmit, and use BCSI in the cloud when security and compliance controls are in place and can be demonstrated during a compliance-monitoring and enforcement process [1]

• (7/12/2021 updated) On July 6, 2021, DoD announced the cancellation of its nearly two-year-old $10 billion JEDI cloud computing project with Microsoft, saying that “the landscape has evolved” and vowing to pursue a "multicloud initiative" with Microsoft, Amazon, and possibly more cloud service providers involved [2] 

• On June 10, 2020, NERC Reliability and Security Technical Committee (RSTC) approved a CIP-004-6 and CIP-011-2 related security guideline on cloud solutions and encrypting BCSI [3]

• On February 20, 2020, FERC issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) to seek the comments and suggestions regarding the potential benefits and risks associated with the use of virtualization and cloud computing in association with bulk electric system operations [4]

• On June 27, 2019, FERC held a technical conference which has extensive discussions upon the use of cloud services in utilities. For example, what are the impacts? What benefits could this technology bring to power systems? How to comply with NERC’s reliability standards while using cloud techs? The conference highlights and releases an important signal: “Utilities and regulators must work collaboratively to ensure that regulatory paradigms including the NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards, encourage the secure and reliable adoption of these technologies [3]

• On October 9, 2018, DoD announced the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud acquisition program with a maximum ceiling of $10 billion across a potential 10-year period to migrate their applications, systems and sensitive data to the cloud [4]