By Rich Heidorn Jr.
NERC has changed the scheduled rollout of its Align software program, with the Texas Reliability Entity and Midwest Reliability Organization turning the switch on “Release 1” in September and other regional entities joining in late October or early November.
“For the longest time, we were saying Sept. 19 was the day” for all the REs, Andrew Williamson, SERC Reliability’s director of reliability assurance, told SERC’s quarterly open forum July 29. “Based on feedback from the stakeholders involved, the [Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program] Steering Committee decided to take a slight change of plan.”
The deployment and training schedule for the remaining regions will be finalized in the next few weeks, Williamson said.
NERC concluded the phased deployment with a smaller population would reduce risks, allowing a reversal of the installation if critical problems are discovered. “We want to make sure that everything is functioning properly,” Williamson said.
He said the software developers have completed all system and process updates that arose during user acceptance (UA) testing in May and completed the second of three “change readiness assessments.”
The developer is continuing to prepare training materials and planning for additional UA and quality assurance testing. Training will begin “once we’ve got the code locked down, after we are assured that everything functions as designed,” Williamson said.
The Release 1 module will cover enforcement, mitigation and self-reporting functions. Monitoring functions such as technical feasibility exceptions, periodic data submittals and self-certifications won’t be live until Release 2 in 2020.
Williamson also provided an update on NERC’s inquiry into possible Chinese ties to BWISE Information Security, which NERC hired to develop Align.
Some registered entities raised concerns after BWISE was sold to SAI Global, an Australia-based company whose investors include a private equity fund managed by a Hong Kong company. (See NERC Investigating Chinese Tie to Software Vendor.)
Williamson told SERC members that NERC has concluded there are no concerns over BWISE’s ownership.
“I spoke to [NERC Chief Technology Officer] Stan Hoptroff, who’s in charge of the project, and he said that NERC worked with an outside government agency to go through and verify that there were no concerns with the ownership. It’s an Australian-based holding company that has significant ownership in Hong Kong. They’ve not been able to find evidence that there’s any issue or concern for the ownership of BWISE at this time,” Williamson said.
Williamson said Align is being hosted on single-tenant servers, by a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program-certified cloud service provider and will require multifactor authentication to access. Documents, communications and data will be encrypted.
“It has to be secure,” Williamson said. “That isn’t an option.”
