Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise Immune System technology, has announced that innovative energy company Open Energi has chosen to deploy Darktrace’s award-winning technology to secure its digital infrastructure.

Open Energi is a British smart grid company whose ‘Dynamic Demand’ technology allows National Grid to balance the UK’s electricity supply and demand in real-time. This patented demand response technology uses the power of the internet to harness flexibility in our demand for energy, making invisible adjustments to the timing of equipment’s electricity consumption. This is helping to deliver a cleaner, cheaper, more efficient and more secure energy future. By 2030, National Grid aims to meet over 50% of grid balancing requirements by adjusting energy demand to meet supply in this manner.

Open Energi partners with companies that manage commercial, stored-energy equipment, such as refrigeration systems, air-conditioning units, water pumps, ovens and boilers. Flexible demand from this equipment is aggregated to create a ‘virtual power station’ that replaces some of the grid balancing work performed by traditional power plants, thereby reducing carbon emissions and lowering costs.

As the Internet of Things (IOT) gathers pace, Darktrace is uniquely positioned to help energy systems become smarter and more efficient, and ultimately cut costs and carbon. Darktrace’s unique Enterprise Immune System, powered by new machine learning and mathematics, is capable of identifying emerging cyber-threats within networks, by understanding the ‘pattern of life’ of every device, user and network. This self-learning approach allows Open Energi to protect itself in the context of constantly-evolving threats, and mitigate any potential problems before they arise.

“Open Energi takes security extremely seriously and we are constantly striving to stay at the forefront of development and best practice in cyber security. We chose Darktrace because it recognizes the realities of today’s threat landscape. Rather than putting rules in place to prevent specific actions, it focuses its technology on recognizing the abnormal and providing intelligence on what is going on throughout the entire network,” said Mike Somers, Information Systems and Security Manager, Open Energi. “Darktrace is the only company that uses mathematical analysis and machine learning to detect potential threats, allowing us to stay ahead of evolving risks.”

“We are delighted to be working with a company as forward-thinking as Open Energi,” said Nick Trim, Managing Director EMEA, Darktrace. “The Enterprise Immune System delivers the self-learning threat detection that enables major critical infrastructure providers to defend themselves, while nurturing the innovation that Open Energi is bringing to the industry.”

About Darktrace

Named ‘Technology Pioneer’ by the World Economic Forum, Darktrace is one of the world’s leading cyber threat defense companies. Its Enterprise Immune System technology detects previously unidentified threats in real time, powered by machine learning and mathematics developed at the University of Cambridge, which analyze the behavior of every device, user and network within an organization. Some of the world’s largest corporations rely on Darktrace’s self-learning appliance in sectors including energy and utilities, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and transportation. The company was founded in 2013 by leading machine learning specialists and government intelligence experts, and is headquartered in Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, including offices in Auckland, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington D.C.

About Open Energi

Open Energi’s unique Dynamic Demand technology aggregates energy consumption from across our customers' sites to provide a fast, flexible solution which is equivalent to a power station, only instead of adjusting supply up or down to meet demand, it adjusts demand up or down to meet supply. Solutions such as this, coupled with on-site generation and energy storage technologies means that the energy market is no longer a linear value chain driven by fossil fuel production but is becoming bi-directional; creating a new energy economy where energy consumers can both take and provide service back to the grid and generate revenue. Dynamic Demand is a Demand Response service unique to Open Energi that reacts instantaneously to second-by-second changes in the balance between supply and demand on the grid.

For more information, visit www.openenergi.com.