Yugo Neumorni, President of CIO Council Romania: Current context hard-pressed the IT departments to find innovative solutions as part of the business continuity plan

“The extraordinary context put us in a contradictory situation and one of the most basic challenges appeared in then area of document management, respectively the issue of digital certificates and electronic signatures. This is maybe one of the most common and basic proofs of digitalization within a company”

The statement has been uttered by Yugo Neumorni, President of CIO Council Romania, CyberSecurity Council Chairman within the recently held e-conference DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CONFERENCE in ENERGY & UTILITIES organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest, bringing together leaders spearheading digital initiatives in their organizations.

These months, the IT departments and professionals working in this field faced a tremendous pressure to come up with on-spot solutions and disruptive ideas regarding the IT infrastructure to enable and ease the operations of companies, which were not necessarily mentioned in the business continuity plans of organizations .

The cyber security is one of the major issues within the whole story od digitalization and interconnectivity. We all remember the December 2015’s Ukraine power grid cyberattack, considered to be the first known successful cyberattack on a power grid. Hackers were able to successfully compromise information systems of three energy distribution companies in Ukraine and 28 sub-stations  and temporarily disrupt electricity supply to the end consumers. In this attack, the hacking was made through the IT department, by phishing, one of the most basic and common hacking. There is why, when we talk about digitalization, especially in sensible and strategic industries such as energy, the cybersecurity and the attentive implementation of technical solutions is extremely vital.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CONFERENCE in ENERGY & UTILITIES organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest on May 7th tackled the ways in which digitalization and innovation drive the emergence of a digital utilities business. The urgent need to understand, integrate and get updated with the new technologies is evident for any organization. Big data, meter data, cloud, Internet of Things, omnichanneling, smart metering are not anymore new concepts but daily working tools and the enablers of digital transformation for utilities.

The e-conference benefited from the support of  Gold Partners Siemens, MET, Horwath & Partners, Kaspersky, SAS, Partners Sea One, Wave and supporting institutions ANRE, CIO Council, ANIS (the Employers’ Association of the Software and Services in Romania), ACUE (Federation of Associations of Energy Utility Companies), AFEER (Association of traders with electricity in Romania), ARPEE (Romanian Association for the Promotion of Energy), Romanian National Committee  of CIGRE, ClujIT, World Energy Council.

The e-conferences, powered by The Diplomat-Bucharest, are a brand new media product, designed to deliver easy and fast, directly to the core audience, the valuable insights of senior figures, experts and the most known specialists in the strategic industries, to discuss  the most pressing aspects in today’s economy landscape.