Practical Adoption of Cloud Computing in Power Systems – Drivers, Challenges, Guidance, and Real-world Use Cases

This report explains why cloud computing supports a variety of power system businesses and summarizes the latest cloud adoption use cases in the power industry. It includes the benefits and risks of moving to the cloud while suggesting risk mitigation strategies at the same time. It also provides valuable guidelines and suggestions for power industry professionals who are considering cloud solutions yet are hesitant about the execution strategies. Based on extensive discussions and experience sharing among task force participants, including grid operators, utility companies, software vendors, and cloud providers, the task force decided to let this document focus on some of the most commonly seen concerns over the cloud, such as cost, service model selection and security control. The task force attempts to address these concerns through case analysis and the best practices we learned from both cloud providers and leading cloud users in the industry. Moreover, this report also investigates other factors that discourage electric utilities from moving to the cloud and seeks corresponding solutions for them. Through multiple use cases and instructions summarized in this report, power industry practitioners are likely to get help for the design or selection of their cloud solutions. Besides, power system software vendors will learn from this report how to make their application products better adapt to the cloud computing environment. Last but not the least, the encompassed work and discussion could provide useful references for the development of NERC guidelines and standards relevant to cloud adoption in the industry. Though a list of terms and definitions are included in the appendix, having a basic understanding of cloud technology and a moderate grasp of some fundamental concepts about cloud adoption is a prerequisite for the readers to comprehend this report.