Managing Incidents in Smart Grids à la Cloud

Over the last decade, the Cloud Computing paradigm has emerged as a panacea for many problems in traditional IT infrastructures. Much has been said about the potential of Cloud Computing in the context of the Smart Grid, but unfortunately it is still relegated to a second layer when it comes to critical systems. Although the advantages of outsourcing these kinds of applications to the cloud is clear, data confidentiality and operational privacy stand as mayor drawbacks. In this paper, we describe some security mechanisms, and specifically, some cryptographic schemes, that will help in a better integration of Smart Grids and Clouds. We propose the use of Virtual SCADA in the Cloud (VS-Cloud) as a means to improve reliability and efficiency whilst maintaining the same protection level as in traditional SCADA architectures.