• CASE STUDY

AI Automation Drives Compliance for Utility Company

Learn how a leading energy provider leverages Swimlane Turbine to enhance its OT/IT security posture, streamline compliance, and save thousands.

Industry

Energy & Utilities

Integration

Dragos

Use Cases

  • Vulnerability management
  • Identity and access management
  • Threat intelligence

Challenges

  • Broad and complex infrastructure
  • Security and regulatory compliance

Challenges

  • Security Operations at Scale
  • Vulnerability Management for OT

About The Customer

This major energy and utilities company in the United States owns and operates power plants, transmission networks, and distribution systems, ensuring reliable power for millions of customers. Committed to innovation, the company utilizes Swimlane Turbine, an AI hyperautomation platform, to enhance efficiency, decrease costs, and uphold the dependability of its critical infrastructure.

Cybersecurity Challenges

Broad and Complex Infrastructure

With operations across multiple states, the security team is responsible for a complex infrastructure overseeing both IT and OT systems. Manually managing all processes to ensure timely and accurate situational awareness—vital for effective threat response and meeting business demands—proves challenging.


Ensure Regulatory Compliance

As a publicly traded company in a highly regulated industry, the team must ensure compliance with the regulations governing their operations. This involves navigating complex standards while scaling security operations to meet the business’s growing needs.

Security Operations at Scale

As the company grows, the security team must scale security operations (SecOps) to address rising risks. Balancing efficiency and control is key. They needed to automate routine tasks to ensure the team stays focused and supports secure growth.

Vulnerability Management for OT

Vulnerability management is a significant challenge in OT environments because patching is more complex than IT systems. In some cases, patching can even introduce risks greater than the vulnerabilities themselves.

AI HYPERAUTOMATION SOLUTION

Private and Secure AI for SecOps

Hero AI is a collection of AI-powered innovations available in the Swimlane Turbine platform. The security team opted to leverage Hero AI for its reliability and privacy. The Enterprise SecOps Manager states: “A standout feature of the Hero AI offering is the emphasis on data privacy. Our data remains ours, and it’s not used to train models for other organizations.”

“Swimlane has been a pioneer in AI, integrating Hero AI to enhance SOC efficiency while maintaining a strong focus on privacy.”

Compliance-Focused OT Deployment

Initially, the utility company deployed Swimlane fully on-premises. Over time, they transitioned to a multi-tenant hybrid deployment model, leveraging the benefits of the Swimlane Turbine cloud-native environment while maintaining an on-premises instance to meet critical regulatory requirements.


“We’ve been Swimlane customers for more than 5 years. We started completely on-prem, and today we have a multi-tenant hybrid deployment. We’ve found real value in the Turbine SaaS environment while maintaining an on-prem environment to help with regulatory commitments.”

Centralized Security through Modular Dashboards

The team leverages Swimlane to centralize IT and OT processes, gaining real-time visibility through modular dashboards. This consolidated view of security operations empowers them to make faster, more informed decisions while ensuring scalable, efficient operations and quicker response times. 

Turbine Canvas: Low-Code Automation for All Skill Levels

Turbine Canvas, the industry’s first ultra-simple low-code automation studio, enables the security team to develop and deploy custom workflows without extensive coding skills quickly. the Enterprise SecOps Manager notes, “Half of my main developers are interns. They bring new ideas and consistently build amazing automations.” By lowering the barrier to automation, Swimlane empowers diverse teams to drive efficiency across the organization.

Unlimited Integration for Scalable Growth

All tools in the utility companies environment are integrated into Turbine, allowing seamless scalability, unified context and improving cross-functional collaboration. While many competitors are acquired by larger firms, which limits flexibility by tying users to proprietary platforms, Swimlane allows for seamless integration with a variety of tools.

“I see Swimlane as a crucial tool not only for security but for the entire organization. With Swimlane’s ability to integrate with any API, it can also act as an orchestration tool for other business functions, keeping security integrated into our operations rather than siloed.”

Professional Services Expertise Drives Success

The Enterprise SecOps Manager believes that relationships are key to overcoming both technology and process challenges, a principle proven through his partnership with Swimlane. He values the strong collaboration and the flexibility it provides, enabling his team to scale beyond traditional security functions.


“We don’t see Swimlane as just a SOAR tool. Honestly, we’ve dropped the ‘S’—we don’t only use Swimlane for security. Swimlane is an automation platform that benefits our entire organization.”

TOP USE CASES

Threat Intelligence Automation

OT Vulnerability Management

Automate Identity Access Management 

AI-Driven OT Threat Anomaly Detection

Modernize Legacy Codebases with AI 

Threat Intelligence Automation

The utility company integrated Dragos with Swimlane Turbine to strengthen its OT security defenses. This intelligence solution enriched data and streamlined threat intelligence workflows providing the team with deeper visibility into potential vulnerabilities. The integrated solution combination has helped the team act on emerging threats in their OT environment faster and more efficiently.
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OT Vulnerability Management

The security team uses Turbine to consolidate vulnerability data into a unified asset inventory, allowing a risk-based approach to remediation. By categorizing vulnerabilities as “now,” “next,” or “never,” they can focus on the most critical issues, addressing them quickly while minimizing disruptions to operations.

Automate Identity Access Management 

Traditional identity governance tools lack automation to support complex workflows and dynamic access controls. Turbine enabled the security team to design advanced workflows that manage identities effectively. This transformation has significantly boosted the efficiency and effectiveness of their identity governance processes.

“What we’ve found with Swimlane is that it allows us to build the level of sophistication we need to align with our organizational values and requirements. The journey from having no automation for our identity governance tools to achieving powerful, impactful workflows has been nothing short of amazing.”

AI-Driven OT Threat Anomaly Detection

Hero AI became indispensable for processing massive datasets and rapidly detecting anomalies that could indicate threats or malfunctions. By learning normal system behavior, it identifies deviations that might signal cyberattacks or equipment failures, saving analysts valuable time. AI became a critical asset in OT security, augmenting human expertise to improve decision-making and response in this complex, high-stakes environment.
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Modernize Legacy Codebases with AI 

Maintaining a “human in the loop” approach was essential. “AI becomes an assistant. It’s not driving our operations; it’s scaling the person.” AI-driven initiatives also include modernizing legacy codebases, with Hero AI analyzing existing code, identifying requirements, and efficiently rewriting it into newer versions.

“I see AI as a powerful sidekick in OT security, working alongside analysts to process vast data quickly and identify patterns or anomalies, like recurring activity that could signal a beacon. While some tasks can be fully automated, the complexity of OT security demands human expertise. AI’s value lies in supporting the ‘human in the loop,’ providing actionable insights that enhance decision-making and scale our capabilities.”

OUTCOMES

Thousands of Hours Saved

Refactoring legacy code with AI automation has significantly reduced development time and led to substantial cost savings, as developer time is a costly resource.

Increased Operational Efficiency

Automation has reduced manual workloads, allowing the team to focus on more strategic security initiatives.

Streamlined Compliance

Automated workflows and reporting capabilities simplify complex regulatory requirements.

Improved Security Posture

Automating processes beyond security, combined with advanced threat intelligence, has strengthened the company’s defenses with a unified approach.

“I would recommend Swimlane to my peers because Swimlane is one of the last standalone, pure-play orchestration and automation companies. We need a partner, not just a platform. We’ve always had a wonderful relationship with Swimlane, and there hasn’t been a challenge to date that we haven’t been able to overcome.”

Enterprise SecOps Manager
Utility Company

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