Cyber threats to the UK’s critical national infrastructure are increasing rapidly. Hydra aims to significantly reduce control‑system recovery times during major incidents, such as system failures or cyberattacks. By enabling faster recovery and minimising disruption, the programme is expected to deliver £293 million in societal benefits by reducing the economic impact of large‑scale power outages.
What is the project about?
Hydra is exploring new technology approaches and business processes designed to dramatically cut recovery times during critical incidents. Cyber threats to critical national infrastructure are growing exponentially, and expanding digital footprints mean that failed software updates, hardware faults, or cyberattacks can leave key systems inaccessible to customers. Traditional disaster‑recovery approaches used across Distribution Network Operators now present a clear opportunity for improvement as digital complexity increases. These mounting challenges highlight the need for innovative solutions that strengthen resilience and security, and ensure operators can swiftly restore systems and customer services when failures occur.
How we’re doing it
We are exploring the possibilities for innovation on several fronts:
Architecture: The fundamental way in which control systems are designed can make them more resilient, secure, and efficient. We are rethinking how control systems could be designed to achieve these goals.
Infrastructure: The technology we use introduces new capabilities that can further enhance security, and increase the speed at which we can recover. We are trialling these components to validate that they can provide an improvement, and can cope with the complexity and scale of our real-world systems.
Process: The changes we are making need new business processes and structures to operate effectively and the introduction of automation to function efficiently. We are building an understanding of how things need to evolve in order to support rapid recovery from critical incidents.
What makes it innovative
Hydra is a globalfirst amongst Distributed Network Operators.The combination of architecture, automation, backupand recovery approach, and supporting processes is unprecedented. This is because control systems are highly complexsystems, which perform massive amounts of tasks every day. This makes the type of changes we are exploring difficult to do, and risky to trial on critical production systems. For this reason, the approach we are taking has not been used in acontrol system environment before anywhere in the world.
What we’re learning
Control Systems are complex environments. They have many intertwined components, and they handle vast numbers of transactions every day. We are learning the best ways to improve how these systems operatewith greater security and resilience. We are also learning whether or not these new approaches can scale to the kind of volumes and complexity that exist within the real world. In addition, we are building an understanding about how our business needs to adapt to support these changes.
Share your ideas
If you have an idea that could reshape or revolutionise the way we work, we want to hear from you.
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