As AI drives demand for energy and water to new heights, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure (CI) continue to skyrocket despite investments in strengthening security postures. According to Industrial Cyber, the Cyfirma Q1 2026 Energy & Utilities Industry Report highlights several alarming trends unfolding in cyberattacks against utility companies:

• A marked rise in threats targeting the sector overall
• Providers appeared in nearly half of advanced persistent threat campaigns, up considerably from the quarter before
• Primary targeting of web applications and operating systems
• A 60% surge in ransomware versus the quarter before 

With attacks on public utilities and operation technology (OT) spiking worldwide, one government-run ministry responsible for its country’s water, energy, and mining operations decided to upgrade its OT network visibility and monitoring operations with Keysight, Vectra, A10, and TrendMicro.  Read the full case study.

But how?

Like many progressive utility providers, the ministry’s IT and security team leaders set out to accomplish multiple challenging goals at once with its modernization effort. The strategy called for data center consolidation around a unified visibility architecture that is able to:

• Capture reliable, analysis-ready network data for performance and security monitoring
• Eliminate blind spots between tools
• Ensure resilience and uptime across distributed sites
• Scale to support a fast-growing national infrastructure
• Reduce complexity while increasing ROI on monitoring tools and bandwidth capacity

After weighing its options for meeting multiple objectives simultaneously, the team settled on a best-of-breed monitoring infrastructure featuring out-of-band performance monitoring from Vectra and inline security monitoring technology from A10 and TrendMicro, all long-time Keysight Alliance Partners.

Visibility connects all the dots

To ensure the highest performance and return on its investments in world-class monitoring, the ministry chose a Keysight Network Visibility Platform to deliver optimal, analysis-ready traffic from the nationwide network. A series of Proof of Concept (PoC) evaluations showed clear-cut advantages of the Keysight platform:

• Best-in-class accuracy and performance
• Ease of use and configuration
• Support for both inline and out-of-band configurations
• Scalability, and flexibility, to meet future demand

The utility provider had used Keysight network packet brokers (NPBs) in other select use cases and been pleased with the high-caliber performance, cost-efficiency, and support they received.

Ready for what comes next.

Together with its alliance partners, Keysight visibility solutions repeatedly outperformed other incumbent approaches. The ministry began standardizing around the Keysight platform, replacing older competing technologies in two primary data centers with Keysight’s Vision 400 and Vision Edge 10G and 40G packet brokers.

Its’ forward-looking modernization initiative allows the ministry to lower costs and consolidate operations across distributed data centers. At the same time, having a state-of-the-art monitoring infrastructure in place creates the foundation for expansion as demand for energy resources continues to grow. Read more.