2027 Event Agenda

For decades, utility protection and control (P&C) engineers maintained absolute authority over the substation through physical isolation and hardwired copper loops. That era of pure isolation is ending. Driven by the demands of DER integration and real-time edge analytics, enterprise IT frameworks—like virtualization, containerization, and centralized software orchestration—are steadily moving into the substation. For traditional OT teams, this seemingly unmanaged influx triggers an immediate fear of losing operational control, sacrificing sub-millisecond reliability, and exposing deterministic safety systems to enterprise software supply chain risk.

Drawing upon Salt River Project’s hands-on experience in evaluating Virtualized Protection , Automation, and Control (VPAC) architectures — running on commercial-grade, real-time edge platforms — this session delivers a utility-focused blueprint for adopting IT scalability on their own terms. We will detail the technical architecture required to decouple 30-year physical substation assets from volatile 5-year software patch lifecycles, and candidly share lessons learned.

Finally, we will address the core operational friction points of this transition. This presentation provides actionable strategies for securing the software supply chain, implementing zero-touch automated patch management at remote and unstaffed substations, and maintaining deterministic execution for critical protection relaying. Attendees will leave with a vendor-agnostic technology roadmap to successfully govern IT software tools at the grid edge while keeping PAC teams firmly in control.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• Govern Enterprise Software Shifts: Deploy IT software methods such as virtualization and container orchestration into deterministic substation environments without degrading protection performance, real-time scheduling, or safety margins.
• Decouple Hardware from Software: Architect a virtualized substation substrate that separates long-term physical asset lifecycles from rapid software security patch cadences.
• Automate Edge Vulnerability Management: Deploy secure software supply chain protocols to patch remote, unstaffed substation edge devices safely and automatically.