Energy & Utilities: Balancing Compliance, Modernization, and Operational Resilience 

Energy and utility companies need to strike the perfect balance between meeting strict compliance requirements while modernizing operations to ensure efficiency and resilience. 

Yet with aging infrastructure and legacy systems keeping the power on, these organizations face significant challenges when it comes to ensuring regulatory compliance and achieving operational agility.  

Evolving cyberthreats expose this outdated technology to all sorts of vulnerabilities that — if exploited — could disrupt power grids, impact service reliability, and otherwise put critical infrastructure at risk.  

With attacks increasing in frequency and sophistication, utilities and energy companies must accelerate digital transformation and modernize infrastructure if they wish to keep bad actors at bay. 

Keep reading to learn more about the evolving regulatory landscape impacting this industrial sector, why migrating away from legacy systems is essential for operational success, and the key role secure collaboration plays in keeping grids online in even the direst of circumstances. 

The Regulatory Landscape: An Overview 

Energy and utility companies operate under a strict, ever-evolving regulatory framework designed to ensure reliability and protect mission-critical systems. In the United States, key regulations include: 

• North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards, which mandate specific cybersecurity controls to protect critical electric grid assets; 
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees energy markets, infrastructure planning, and grid reliability; and 
• State and regional mandates, which control renewable energy targets and emissions requirements. 

The story for European energy and utility companies is similar. Such organizations must also comply with myriad regulations, including: 

• EU Clean Energy Package, a framework designed to accelerate the European Union’s (EU) transition to clean energy (e.g., decarbonization and renewables);  
• Network Codes and Guidelines, a framework that standardizes technical rules for electricity and gas markets across the EU to ensure grid stability and support cross-border energy trading; and
• NIS2 Directive, a cybersecurity directive that strengthens security requirements for critical infrastructure organizations, including energy and utility companies. 

No matter where your organization is, maintaining compliance with these regulations while ensuring operational efficiency presents several challenges: 

• Compliance burdens. While organizations must maintain robust cybersecurity controls, evolving threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks make continuous compliance resource-intensive. 
• Legacy infrastructure. Many utility companies rely on decades-old infrastructure that needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, legacy systems are much more susceptible to cyberattacks. Just ask Equifax, whose 2017 breach impacted nearly half of the US population. 
• Sustainability. Regulators are pushing for cleaner energy sources, no doubt a noble goal. Unfortunately, integrating renewables into the grid while maintaining stability is a difficult and costly challenge. 
• Complexity. Meeting the requirements of federal, state, and regional regulations takes a lot of time. Since noncompliance can result in hefty fines and other penalties, utilities need to devote significant resources to administration. 

The Risk of Relying on Legacy Systems 

Utilities and energy companies rely on legacy systems for three main reasons:  

1. They still function,
2. Migrating to new infrastructure is disruptive, and
3. Maintaining the status quo is believed to be cost-effective.  

Whatever the merits of legacy tech, such technology poses serious cybersecurity risks and causes operational inefficiencies. After all, outdated software and hardware solutions usually don’t receive security updates, making them prime targets for ransomware attacks and data breaches. One needs to simply look at the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack — a global attack exploiting outdated Windows operating systems — to see what can happen when software isn’t updated and vulnerabilities remain. 

Without proactively modernizing infrastructure, organizations risk costly breaches, compliance failures, and extensive downtime. 

On top of this, legacy systems also create operational bottlenecks that slow processes down. Many older platforms don’t integrate well with modern tools, which can slow incident response down significantly. When a cybersecurity incident occurs, response teams need real-time visibility and rapid coordination to resolve it as quickly as possible. This is simply not possible with legacy systems, which often lack automation and centralized control, thereby delaying response times. 

Since every extra minute increases damages, downtime, and financial losses, organizations must modernize their infrastructure to improve system interoperability and streamline and enhance incident response capabilities. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before outdated systems quite predictably become critical points of failure. 

Bridging Compliance & Efficiency with Secure Collaboration 

For energy and utility companies, secure collaboration is essential for balancing compliance and security with operational efficiency.  

With a secure collaboration platform serving as the glue that connects the team, field operators, control centers, and front-line workers can all access and share data in real time, enhancing situational awareness while improving coordination and decision-making. 

In incident response scenarios, secure communication is critical for minimizing downtime. Whether investigating cyber threats, equipment failures, or grid disruptions, teams need a reliable, real-time collaboration tool to coordinate efforts, mitigate risks, and restore operations swiftly. On the flipside, without a central collaboration platform, teams are slowed down by siloed communications, leading to prolonged outages, regulatory penalties, and frustrated customers.  

At the same time, a secure collaboration helps energy and utility operators to streamline audits while maintaining compliance with real-time logging, data encryption at rest and in transit, and automatic reporting. This, in turn, enables these organizations to ensure audit-readiness without incurring massive administrative burdens. 

By implementing a secure collaboration solution, energy providers can increase focus, enhance resilience, and ensure compliance — all while maintaining uninterrupted operations. 

Why Energy & Utilities Trust Mattermost for Collaboration 

As a secure collaboration platform built for the strictest environments, Mattermost is the preferred collaboration solution for energy providers and utility companies.  

For example, Réseau de Transport Électrique (RTE), the manager of France’s electrical infrastructure, uses Mattermost to maintain steady lines of communication during outages and incidents. In the Czech Republic, Pramacom uses Mattermost to ensure an emergency communications network is always available for police, firefighters, first responders, and military units.  

In both cases, failure is not an option. With Mattermost, both RTE and Pramacom can comply with strict cybersecurity and regulatory mandates while maintaining real-time operational efficiency. 

For energy providers and utility companies, Mattermost stands out as the ideal collaboration solution by providing: 

• Self-hosted, secure collaboration. Unlike other popular SaaS offerings only available through the cloud, Mattermost can be hosted on-premises, on infrastructure organizations control, giving them complete data sovereignty. 
• Out-of-band communication. By hosting Mattermost on their own infrastructure, operators can maintain open lines of communication even when primary networks fail. 
• Unlimited extensibility. As an open source solution, Mattermost seamlessly integrates with DevSecOps workflows, incident response tooling, and even AI to streamline mission-critical operations. 
• Baked-in compliance. Built for compliance, Mattermost helps energy companies and utilities to adhere to relevant regulations out of the box without slowing down operations. 
• Fast, familiar interface. Mattermost’s intuitive design ensures teams can use the platform productively in short order, accelerating time to value. 

To learn more about how Mattermost can help critical infrastructure organizations use structured cybersecurity incident response frameworks to remain operational in any scenario, read this.