Why utilities must make packet-level visibility their priority

Energy, nuclear, water and wastewater utilities are foundational in Asia Pacific because they stabilise and fuel the economy of the 21st century. As the energy sector accelerates digitalisation in countries such as Singapore, China and Australia through adding remote monitoring, distributed renewables and edge analytics - the traditional separation between operational technology (OT) and IT is disappearing. That convergence delivers important efficiency and decarbonisation benefits, but it also exposes control systems to the same adversarial pressures that enterprise networks have faced for years. The stakes are different in OT: an invisible compromise can translate into unscheduled downtime, physical safety risks and cascading impact on essential services.

According to a recent EY Global Cybersecurity Leadership Insights Study, energy firms struggle with cybersecurity. Only 35% say they are well-positioned to take on the threats of tomorrow, compared to 48% of all other industries. The energy sector is well aware of its vulnerabilities, as cybersecurity threats around the world have opened this new front, and recognise that most industries have some form of dependence on this critical infrastructure. The threat landscape is now flourishing as utilities and energy companies across the region are quickly increasing interconnectedness and the digitisation of their systems to gain operational efficiencies and meet customer demands.

This is why there is a new imperative for operational control that every utility needs – and it is not another perimeter appliance: it is guaranteed, packet-level visibility of OT traffic so teams can identify assets, detect anomalous control flows and enable rapid, confident response and recovery.

Why visibility must now be the foundation for utilities

Security or analytics tools are only as effective as the telemetry that feeds them. In industrial environments, that telemetry must include protocol context and full-duplex packet capture. Many OT protocols (Modbus, DNP3, IEC-104 and vendor proprietary formats) behave in ways that make sampled traffic unreliable for forensics or anomaly detection. A purpose-built visibility fabric consisting of passive test access points (TAPs), aggregators and network packet brokers delivers guaranteed packet-level visibility without introducing latency or single points of failure. It also supplies the consistent inputs intrusion detection system (IDS), network detection and response (NDR) and asset-discovery tools need to function correctly. This approach is now a necessity to underpin forensic readiness for utilities.

Operationalising a visibility foundation

Utilities can operationalise a visibility foundation by aligning it with the established Identify–Protect–Detect–Respond–Recover lifecycle:

• Identify. Passive packet capture with protocol decoding creates an authoritative OT asset inventory: controllers, remote terminal units, human machine interfaces, field devices and their communication patterns. That inventory is the baseline for segmentation, risk scoring and supply-chain prioritisation.
• Protect. Observing traffic at demarcation points validates segmentation and access policies that actually work in practice. Visibility helps verify identity and remote-access controls and confirms least-privilege enforcement across zones without touching production device firmware.
• Detect. Protocol-aware detection and behavioural baselining require full packet context to reliably identify anomalous command sequences, unexpected timings or spoofed device traffic that byte-level signatures alone miss. Visibility reduces false positives and improves meaningful detections.
• Respond. A long-term packet store allows incident teams to replay exact command flows, perform targeted root-cause analysis and craft containment actions that minimise operational disruption, shortening mean-time-to-contain.
• Recover. After containment, packet evidence supports verification that devices returned to expected states, that no persistence remains, and that normal control patterns have been restored - speeding safe return to service.

Pragmatic deployment patterns for utility networks

Engineering teams don't need a rip-and-replace approach. Start with high-leverage, non-disruptive deployments:

1. Instrument aggregation points. Wide area network (WAN) aggregation and concentrator nodes between control centres and substations are powerful vantage points for asset discovery and protocol decoding.
2. TAP the demarcation. Install passive TAPs at substation demarcation and at remote terminal unit/human machine interface concentrators to guarantee 100% packet capture without adding latency or failure modes.
3. Augment monitoring tools with packet brokers. Use packet brokers to aggregate, deduplicate and filter traffic so IDS, NDR and protocol collectors receive only the telemetry they need and aren't overwhelmed.
4. Iterate on brownfield deployments. Identify critical circuits, deploy TAPs out-of-band, validate baselines and expand incrementally to avoid risky "big bang" changes to operational networks.

Operational metrics that matter

Convert visibility into measurable risk reduction by tracking:

• packet-capture coverage (percent of control-plane and field links observed)
• time-to-detect for anomalous control commands
• mean-time-to-contain
• false-positive rates for industrial control systems detection signatures
• forensic readiness (time to retrieve and decode captured packets).

These key metrics let engineering and security teams demonstrate a tangible impact to boards and regulators.

As the broader digital economy continues to expand, grid digitalisation is irreversible. The strategic question for utilities across Asia Pacific isn't whether to adopt new operational technologies, it's whether visibility will be built in as the system foundation from day one. Packet-level visibility is the operational prerequisite that allows utilities to see, verify and act on what truly matters in industrial control system networks: control commands, device behaviour and protocol anomalies, without jeopardising uptime. For resilient, secure grid operations, a deliberate visibility fabric is not optional; it's indispensable.