If you’re rolling out new connected assets across substations, transformers or EV charging sites, you already know the hardest part isn’t the hardware or the wireless connectivity itself. The real challenge is getting security, operations and procurement to move together.
I see it every week when I’m talking to customers in the field. Security is responsible for every potential breach. operations gets measured on uptime and visibility. Procurement is accountable for every cost. Each team speaks a different language, operates on different timelines and reports to different executives. That’s where friction builds. Approvals slow down.
But here’s what I’ve learned. While each team’s immediate goals look different on paper, the pressure each is under is identical: keep the grid secure, connected and resilient.
Downtime in energy operations isn’t just inconvenient; it’s expensive and dangerous. Research shows that downtime costs can exceed $9,000 per minute.
The grid’s risk profile is rising. The U.S. Department of Energy has warned that many regions will face elevated reliability risks within the next five years. That shift is raising the stakes for any new deployment. When systems go down, the impact spreads fast across critical infrastructure.
From working directly with energy and utility teams, I’ve learned that when security, operations, and procurement aren’t aligned from the start, small issues turn into expensive delays. I’ve put together a few things that really help to get ahead of these challenges.
Frame New Deployments as Risk Reduction, Not Innovation
The toughest deployments I’ve seen are the ones in which operations moves fast to get something working. Because uptime is their job, the team may bypass security altogether. Security then finds out three months later during an audit. Now teams have unmanaged endpoints, unclear access policies and a retrofit security conversation that should have happened up front.
I’ve seen this play out hundreds of times. Security isn’t trying to slow you down. It’s trying to maintain control of what touches the network because a single unmanaged router or field gateway can open doors to much bigger problems.
Instead of leading with speed or new features, start with the risks you can help security take off the table:
- Fewer unmanaged devices
- Fewer unknown configurations
- Faster detection when something goes wrong
- Clearer boundaries between IT and field networks
- Better audit-ready visibility
A quick tip: Avoid describing deployments as “plug and play.” Security hears that as “new risks we can’t see yet.” Its priority is knowing what enters the environment and how it’s validated.
Show security where control lives:
- Data boundaries: What data leaves the site, and how? Do we need to route traffic away from the public internet?
- Access control: Who can access what and from where, and how are identities verified?
- Network isolation: Which connections require segmentation or inspection?
- Incident response: How will recovery happen remotely if a device misbehaves?
- Visibility: How do we report device status and configuration changes?
- Compliance: Which frameworks (NERC CIP, ISO 27001, etc.) does this touch?
Once security understands that risk is being reduced, approvals move faster.
Standardize Where You Have Control Today
Most energy organizations run mixed estates with different vendors, contracts and hardware generations. No single team controls it all. Operations wants speed, security wants consistency, and procurement wants predictability. So instead of trying to overhaul everything at once, start where you have authority. Ask where you can set a standard today.
Begin with:
- New rollouts
- Scheduled maintenance or upgrades
- Systems already under your direct management
Document those standards. Every time you deploy under that model, you prove what “good” looks like. Over time, that success will spread naturally.
Each new rollout will become:
- One less exception to manage
- One more validation for security
- A step closer to consistent governance
That’s how you build trust and create a framework the rest of the business can adopt.
Treat Visibility as Operational Control, Not a “Nice to Have”
Visibility gives operators control over their environment. It shows what’s online, what’s failing and what’s changing across sites, devices and carriers. When teams can’t see what’s happening, they can’t act with confidence, and small issues turn into bigger operational risks.
Let’s put this into perspective.
A substation running hundreds of connected devices loses a critical camera feed at 2:17 a.m. Instead of dispatching a field technician, the network team is alerted within minutes. Through a unified management layer, the system automatically detects the outage and triggers a policy-driven failover to a secondary cellular network using multi-network SIMs. Real-time diagnostics confirm the failover event and the restored feed.
If the primary path is completely down, out-of-band management keeps a secure link open so engineers can log in remotely, diagnose the fault and restore service straight from the NOC. Security verifies network integrity and logs the incident, while Compliance automatically records the event and resolution, maintaining a full audit trail for NERC CIP and ISO 27001.
That’s unified visibility at work, cutting recovery time, eliminating unnecessary truck rolls, and keeping security and operations aligned.
Build the Business Case Around Recovery Speed, Not Just Uptime
Uptime alone doesn’t sell projects anymore. Uptime is the minimum, but recovery speed sells the business case. Most outage time isn’t the repair itself. It’s the hours spent trying to diagnose where the failure sits. That delay is often the biggest operational drain on the profit and loss statement because it stalls sales, slows operations and pulls teams away from planned work.
The faster teams can identify and respond to an issue, the less downtime costs, the fewer compliance risks and the smaller the operational impact. When you measure time to detect and time to recover, you can prove the value of better visibility and orchestration.
When you bring this to leadership, keep the focus on outcomes:
- Risk is lower because we detect and recover faster.
- Security deals with fewer one-off approvals because deployments are consistent.
- Audit data is easier to collect because status and changes are visible.
- Remote recovery cuts field visits, which keeps costs predictable.
The KPI that lands with both the CFO and CISO: We spend less when we fix faster.
Where to Go From Here
Managing wireless networks across substations, renewables and EV sites is a complex job. Between security requirements, uptime targets and new connected assets coming online every month, it can be hard to keep visibility and control in sync.
If you want to see how other operators are solving this, visit our energy connectivity page to explore security-first wireless architectures, see FAQs from teams managing similar deployments and learn how carrier-agnostic connectivity can eliminate single points of failure.
Or if you’d rather talk through your specific setup, we also offer 30-minute strategy calls during which we will:
- Take a fresh look at your current wireless setup and how it compares to industry benchmarks.
- Share lessons learned from other energy and infrastructure operators modernizing their connectivity.
- Identify simple steps to improve network resilience, visibility and cost control.
You’ll leave with clear, practical ideas you can take straight back to your team.
Schedule Your Wireless Strategy Review
Guest Author
David Mendoza — Enterprise Sales Director at Globalgig
David Mendoza brings over a decade of experience across embedded systems, IoT connectivity and secure networking. He works with energy and infrastructure operators deploying connected systems across substations, renewables and field environments. His background includes senior roles at Silicon Labs, Digi International and Cavium, where he supported engineering, operations and security teams responsible for device integrity, OT security and large-scale field deployments. This experience gives him a practical understanding of the operational, security and compliance pressures that shape modern energy projects, helping teams reduce rework, improve reliability and move faster from pilot to production.