In Touch with Entouch: The Importance of Network Security

If networks weren’t vulnerable to breaches, intrusions, viruses, and cyber-attacks, they wouldn’t need to be secure. Robust network security is a must for proper energy management solutions to be effective. Frank Menocal, CTO of ENTOUCH, spoke about the importance of network security for energy management systems and how IT departments can safeguard their networks.

Menocal said cybersecurity requires constant vigilance, especially for those preparing to bring a new system online into an existing enterprise network. “The most important thing is to have a level of confidence in the vendor and the products you’re bringing in, that they’ve gone thorough and sound security review process. Because the last thing you want to do for all good intentions of bringing in a great system brings a trojan horse into your organization that opens up vulnerabilities.”

Security measures from energy management service providers like ENTOUCH start with edge equipment that resides within the organization. “That’s the single most vulnerable point of any organization once you bring it into your network,” Menocal said. “We make sure our devices are not allowing any traffic destined for them that they don’t expect. So, the first thing we do is, we don’t allow any connections to be established on our devices.” All network traffic gets diverted to the cloud, not the devices.

Another layer of protection Menocal said was critical is to ensure anything downloaded to the devices is digitally signed and secured. “All of it must be done through a secured communication channel that is only allowed to communicate with our cloud. There are multiple levels of security, both at a network level and at the application level, and also authentication. We authenticate any communications on that device. So, you’ve got three different levels of security.”