Julian Pablo

CYSE200T

Professor Skip Hiser

April 9, 2026

SCADA Write Up

SCADA and the Protection of Critical Infrastructures

            B.L.U.F: SCADA is a crucial control system for critical infrastructures to ensure reliable uptime to prevent the severe consequences with any downtime. 

            Critical infrastructures are the essential systems and foundations that are crucial for almost any give society. This would include areas like transportation systems, water supplies/wastewater treatments, and agriculture sectors.

            The biggest risk that comes with critical infrastructures is the damage done if they were to go down for even a few minutes. It’s estimated the financial cost for per minute a critical infrastructure is down could range from $5k to $10k (Paloalto, n.d). This would also involve damage to society like contamination to water supply or multiple transits going down.

            This is where SCADA comes in to help keep an eye these critical infrastructures–SCADA is a control system that’s used to manage and monitor critical infrastructures (SCADA systems, n.d). It has many moving parts like its remote terminal units (RTU’s) that collects the data and transfers to a central system called the human machine interface for workers to view. SCADA also implements redundancy to the critical infrastructures where even if one part of the system fails the whole will continue to function.

            In conclusion, SCADA allows assurance that critical infrastructures don’t have downtime through constant monitoring and redundancy features. The automation and reliability SCADA offers makes it a much-needed system for any critical infrastructure

References

(n.d). SCADA Systems Using SCADA to Protect Critical Infrastructure and Systems, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VnMlL2YmcW5Jg4MdDa1dt5fJpmQM0KVH/edit

(n.d). What is Critical Infrastructure? Paloalto, https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-critical-infrastructure