Case Study: Leading Canadian Energy Utility secures smart meters, increases resilience, and reduces costs with Thales Luna HSMs

Thales Helps a Canadian Energy Utility Secure Smart Meters, Increase Resilience, and Reduce Costs

Leading Canadian Energy Utility was moving from analog to connected digital smart meters for more than two million customers and faced strict privacy and resilience regulations while needing compatibility with Cisco Field Network Director (FND) across terrestrial and satellite installations. Thales was selected to provide a hardware-based cryptographic solution, specifically Thales Luna Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), to meet those security and compliance requirements.

Thales deployed FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Luna HSMs integrated with Cisco FND to secure certificate authentication and every command to millions of Itron smart meters, keeping cryptographic keys inside tamper-resistant hardware. The Thales solution enabled audit compliance (NERC, PIPEDA, PCI), improved network resilience via secure real-time device connectivity, and reduced operational costs by lowering in-person inspections, curbing electricity theft, and simplifying management.