Mission-Critical DevOps for the Energy Transition.
We build deployment pipelines for the regulated grid estate: CI/CD that respects NERC CIP change control, patch orchestration scheduled around grid operating conditions, and infrastructure automation that keeps analytics moving fast without ever reaching into the electronic security perimeter. Water utilities get the same boundary discipline around treatment-works SCADA and WIMS estates.
Fragmented Silos
Legacy Utility systems and disconnected feeds.
Segmentation-Aware Pipelines
Compliance as Pipeline Output
Production Reality
CIP-Aware Change Pipelines
CIP-Aware Change Pipelines
Purdue-Segmented Deployment Tiers
Evidence-Generating Release Gates
Industry-Specific Friction Points
Change Control vs Change Speed
CIP-010 configuration change management makes every modification to in-scope cyber assets a documented, baselined event — so teams either slow to a crawl or route around the process, and both outcomes surface as audit findings.
Patching Under Uptime Constraints
CIP-007 requires security patches to be evaluated on a fixed cadence, but grid systems have no natural maintenance window. Unpatched intermediaries between OT and IT become the soft spot that attackers and auditors both find first.
Two Estates, One Pipeline Mindset
Corporate DevOps assumptions — agents everywhere, outbound internet, continuous deployment — break inside a Purdue-segmented network, and applying them naively to grid-adjacent systems widens the attack surface instead of shrinking it.
How the Utility delivery flow works
This technical flow diagram reveals how Unolabs treats Utility data to deliver governed, production-ready outputs.
Source Layer
Release Gateway
Structuring pipelines by trust zone, with automated deploys corporate-side and gated, documented releases towards OT-adjacent tiers.
Industry Logic
Baseline Guard
Tracking configuration baselines and drift on in-scope systems so CIP-010 evidence exists before anyone requests it.
Patch Orchestration
Sequencing security patches around switching operations and load conditions, with rollback plans rehearsed rather than assumed.
Activation
Reliability Ops
Monitoring the data and application estate feeding grid operations with error budgets set to operational, not web, tolerances.
How the work is engineered for Utility
Segmentation-Aware Pipelines
We design CI/CD that deploys automatically across the corporate and DMZ tiers, while everything destined for higher-trust zones flows through controlled, evidence-generating release gates.
Compliance as Pipeline Output
We wire configuration baselines, change records, and approval trails into the pipeline itself, so CIP change-management evidence is generated by each release rather than reconstructed before audits.
Boundary-Preserving Automation
We automate infrastructure and data-pipeline operations up to the electronic security perimeter — and stop there by design, with one-way flows carrying outward what analytics needs.
Where the Real Work Is
The Release Calendar Follows the Grid
In most industries the deployment schedule is an engineering choice; in a utility it is subordinate to the operating calendar. Planned switching, peak-load days, and storm-season readiness postures all constrain when OT-adjacent systems may change, and a missed window can push a release out by weeks. We couple the CI/CD calendar to the operational calendar explicitly — categorising changes by blast radius, pre-approving low-risk corporate-tier work, and treating scarce maintenance windows as rehearsed events with rollback drilled beforehand.
Audit Evidence as a Build Artifact
CIP audits sample changes and ask for the trail: the baseline before, the approval, the difference applied, the verification after. Teams that assemble this retroactively spend weeks per audit reconstructing what a pipeline could have recorded in seconds. We wire evidence generation into the release process itself — configuration snapshots, linked change requests, and post-deploy verification captured per release into an evidence store — so an auditor's sample request becomes a query, not a scavenger hunt.
The Middle Tier Carries the Risk
The systems between corporate IT and the control network — jump hosts, DMZ brokers, monitoring relays — are the most attacked and most audited machines in the estate, yet they often belong to no one's patch schedule. CIP-007 requires security patches to be evaluated on a 35-day cycle for in-scope systems, and these intermediaries are where the obligation bites hardest. We give the middle tier first-class treatment: inventoried, baselined, drift-monitored, and patched through orchestrated windows with rollback staged.
Visible work products, not vague advice
Each deliverable is designed to be used by Utility architects, engineers, data owners, and operations teams after the engagement ends.
How We Measure Regulated Delivery
Delivery speed and audit readiness are usually framed as a trade-off; we measure both so neither is sacrificed silently. Baselines come from your own change history in the first weeks.
Deployment lead time by trust zone
Time from merge to production, tracked separately for corporate-tier and OT-adjacent releases — the goal is fast where fast is safe, and predictable where gates are mandatory.
Time-to-evidence per change
Hours to assemble a complete evidence package for a sampled change, measured before automation and after — the clearest single indicator of audit-season pain removed.
Patch evaluation timeliness
Share of applicable security patches evaluated within the mandated cycle for in-scope systems, with the aging queue visible instead of discovered at audit.
Change failure rate on gated releases
Percentage of OT-adjacent releases requiring rollback or emergency fix — gates are supposed to buy safety, and this measure verifies they actually do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will CI/CD automation ever touch systems inside the security perimeter?
No — the boundary is a design constraint, not an obstacle to automate around. Pipelines deploy automatically through corporate and DMZ tiers and stop there; anything destined for higher-trust zones moves under your existing OT change process, with the pipeline contributing packaged artefacts, documentation, and evidence rather than access.
Can the pipeline produce the change evidence CIP auditors sample?
That is one of its primary outputs. Each gated release captures the configuration baseline before and after, the linked change request and approvals, and post-deployment verification results into an evidence store. When an audit samples a change, the package already exists — assembled by the release that made the change, not by staff weeks later.
How do releases work during storm season?
By classification, not blanket freeze. Readiness postures pause OT-adjacent and high-blast-radius changes, while low-risk corporate-tier work continues through its normal automated path. The categories, the freeze triggers, and who can authorise an exception are agreed with operations in advance and encoded in the pipeline — so storm posture is a switch, not a negotiation.
How an engagement starts
Start with a working session on one real change: pick a recent release that was painful to evidence or schedule, and we map the gates, baselines, and records a compliant pipeline would have produced for it automatically.
Interested in the full industry blueprint?
We have deeper technical documentation for DevOps & SRE for Utility in the Utility sector.
Bring one SCADA-adjacent patch you keep deferring. We'll plan its safe window together.