Availability Study of the Italian Electricity SCADA System in the Cloud

Recently, the allure of the cloud is also affecting the SCADA systems. Cloud-based commercial solutions to manage small private SCADA systems are spreading, while the utilities are still evaluating the cloud adoption. For electric utility companies, reasons for moving in the cloud can be traced to the need of storing, accessing and analyzing a huge amount of records collected from their new smart meters, and managing grid-connected small-scale decentralized energy generation from renewable sources. Moreover, the cloud allows an easy and affordable deploy of monitor dashboards, populated with accurate consumption data, accessible at anytime from anywhere, directly to the customers’ smartphones. On the other hand, cloud poses fears on security, privacy and system downtime. In this work, we focus on the latter aspect analyzing the availability of the SCADA system managing the Italian power transmission network for different possible adoptions of the cloud.