Minimizing Development Time by Automating System Platform Configuration

Sentinel Peak Resources, an upstream oil and gas company focused on heavy oil development and extraction, operates many sites with numerous process areas across hundreds of miles. As they acquire existing production assets, they also inherit controls systems that can present physical and cybersecurity gaps because of their remote locations.

In one acquisition, they identified a widespread misconfiguration that meant anyone in the field with physical access to a touchscreen could potentially disrupt the system platform SCADA system. The affected access control settings could reach more than 300,000 attributes in the AVEVA System Platform galaxy. Even in an optimal scenario, auditing and reconfiguring that volume of attributes would have taken a full-time employee more than four years. Contracting the work could have reduced the timeline, but cost more than $2 million.

Tetra Tech used the AVEVA GRAccess toolkit to develop custom software for automated logging, validation, and updating of security configurations. GRAccess is a developer-focused software development kit that provides deep access to generate or modify configurations at scale and securely exposes the Galaxy object model for programmatic access to users, groups, scripts, templates, objects, and attributes. By automating more than 300,000 manual configuration tasks, we moved from conception to deployment in under a month. The solution eliminated manual intervention, reduced the risk of human error, and cut configuration time by more than 98 percent. It also saved Sentinel Peak Resources more than $2 million by enabling cybersecurity measures through a custom program.