Force 5
Enabling NERC CIP and OSHA Compliance

Power Utilities faced with potential outages on the grid, safety issues, and stiff fines are aggressively seeking technology solutions to help eliminate outdated methods. Historically, labor intensive, error prone methods have been used to collect the information required by NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) and OSHA Safety requirements programsin order to pass audits. “These regulations require adherence and a much greater detail when it comes to ‘who, why and when’ visitors enter areas deemed to be critical infrastructure areas and verifying those visitors have the proper credentials and training to be there safely,” states James Evelyn, General Manager - Security and Compliance Offerings at Force 5. Founded in 2000, this Miami-based firm offers unique enterprise solution for the Power and Utility industry designed to provide audit-ready evidence, constant situational awareness, and persistent risk assessment.

Force 5’s Gatekeeper is built to meet the safety, security and compliance needs of power utilities. This robust solution produces compliance-based evidence and forensics needed for real-time risk analysis and audit-ready reporting helping businesses achieve and maintain compliance and mitigate operational risk. Gatekeeper eliminates the age-old practice of logging access with paper logbooks, and provides awareness through dashboards, logs, and report generation.

Built specifically to meet CIP regulatory audit requirements, Force 5’s Gatekeeper combines physical access logging with identity management and validation. Its touch-screen kiosks with facial recognition and biometric readers validate that the escorts haveall the correct credentials to meet Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) regulatory requirements and ensure that the visit will pass the meticulous review of an audit.
“Gatekeeper mitigates riskby providing the complete history and audit trail allowing organizations to manage not only their escortand visitor identities but also objects, like physical keys,” adds Evelyn. Moreover, the Gatekeeper Offering provides clients with point of entry compliance for OSHA regulations. Gatekeeper helps utilities monitor, log, muster, enforce, and track at a facility’s points of entry. Gatekeeper Perimeter Enforcement Buildings (PEB’s) provide temporary or long-term structures for secure perimeter access logging to accelerate, consolidate, and optimize the worker / plant access process. Force 5’s Mobile Muster Kiosks increase situational awareness with a real-time roster of visitors in case of an emergency.

The unique, self-service platform provides for an “Always Audit Ready” single unified platform. Its architecture delivers a distributed implementation where local systems sync back to an archival server, ensuring availability at all times. The adoption of these solutions has brought a significant difference for their clients which include the largest, most well-known power utilities by helping them move away fromerr or-prone and geographically dispersed paper logbooks. "We had no violations or self-reports after implementing Gatekeeper, log remediation is done in minutes instead of weeks, and when needed it is done proactively," says one of Force 5's clients.