Compliance
With a strong history supporting plants to meet compliance requirements and trends in the Australian energy sector, we are well positioned to help you create maximum benefit from existing compliance expectations.
How to do Compliance well
Navigating compliance well involves a focus on the present as much as it does the future. It also involves thinking strategically about your priorities and resources to best maximise any compliance efforts.
Analyse your current status
Do you know how your plants map against the various Maturity Level Indicators and Security Profiles outlined in the Australian Energy Cyber Security Framework (AECSF)? How prepared is your organisation to progress along this roadmap? Do you have access to the right skillsets and resources? How quickly could you respond to changes from AEMO?
Set your target
Whilst compliance to the base AECSF requirements is a bare minimum target, it may be more strategic to proactively progress compliance further along the projected compliance roadmap. Taking into consideration your organisations current priorities, risk appetite and access to resource will often help in this exploration.
Look for extra easy wins
A well designed plan may also result in a number of additional easy wins. With skills and expertise involved, it’s often easy to configure a piece of hardware or software to serve additional benefits other than just that prescribed by the desired project outcome. This may also be achievable with no extra cost. For example you may want to monitor hardware to alert for a security breach, for minimal extra effort you could also use that same new monitoring capacity to improve that hardwares performance or make maintaining it easier.
Don't recreate the wheel
Much about good compliance is not necessarily specific to a particular plant. Whether you own or manage one plant, or a large network, you shouldn’t need to start your compliance journey from scratch. We can provide existing, approved and future-proof compliance practices, procedures and other documentation to make your compliance journey as easy as possible. Even without our support, good compliance is scalable and you can benefit by building this philosophy into your compliance approach.
Develop a plan
After understanding where you are and where you want to be, it’s time to develop an optimal plan to get there. This plan will determine how likely you are to fully reach your target, how quickly you get there, how easy the journey is, and how much it costs.
Create a culture of compliance
Good compliance is not just about having acceptable hardware, software and documentation, but also considers your organisational culture. If you can create a culture where compliance more naturally and effortlessly occurs, this will not just make your compliance efforts more reliable, but often cheaper as well.
Keep documents updated
Achieving a level of desired compliance is an important exercise. Yet so is maintaining compliance. One of the tasks important to this is maintaining various documentation. It is unlikely your software, hardware, practices, processes or personnel will stay static. As these things change, your documentation will need to be updated. Although this sounds basic, it’s an activity that often gets lost amongst other competing priorities.
What is the AESCSF?
Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework
The Australian Energy Sector Cybersecurity Framework is a new regulatory structure aimed at ensuring Australia’s energy sector is protected from cybersecurity threats. As of the 17th of August 2023, compliance with the AESCSF is mandatory for all Australian powerplants. Compliance is structured across 3 Maturity Index Levels (MILs) to enable plants to initialise and ramp up their cybersecurity gradually, beginning with ad hoc cybersecurity solutions at MIL-1 and building toward a fully mature cybersecurity program.
Risk Management
the practices involved in identifying, analysing and mitigating cybersecurity risk to the organisation
Cybersecurity Program Management
the administration of a cybersecurity program providing governance, strategic planning, and sponsorship for the organisation’s cybersecurity activities
Asset, Change and Configuration Management
managing and maintaining the organisation’s technological assets with regards to infrastructural risk factors
Identity and Access Management
managing access to the organisation’s assets by the creation and maintenance of secure user identities with relevant access privileges
Information Sharing and Communications
managing the logging and analysis of cybersecurity information across different areas of the plant, contributing to overall situational awareness
Threat and Vulnerability Management
addressing cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities through a process of identification, analysis, management and incident response
Situational Awareness
the creation and maintenance of a common operating picture (COP) by collecting, analysing, communicating, and making best use of operational and cybersecurity information
Event and incident response, continuity of operations
putting processes in place to detect, analyse and respond to cybersecurity events
Benefits of Working with Us
Working with OpusV can provide your new or existing plant with a host of benefits.
Less stress and expense
Benefit from our experience to save you both stress and cost.
Reduced Liability
Reduce your liability by outsourcing key advice.
Increased Security
Benefit from our comprehensive security knowledge across a variety of sensitive domains such as finance, healthcare and data centres.
Access nationally pre-approved documentation
Leverage our past work by gaining access to documentation and processes previously approved.
Benefit from national knowledge
Gain access to our knowledge of how power plants throughout Australia have tackled similar problems.
Security and Compliance Umbrella
Take the hassle out of security and compliance by joining our Security and Compliance Umbrella. All plants covered by the Umbrella are proactively protected against ever evolving security threats or cyber security compliance changes.
