Having worked with Survalent at a prior utility, I approached Survalent hoping that there would be a viable solution that would get our SCADA system off the ground. Survalent posed the hosted option to us. Survalent came through in a huge way for us.
The Challenge
Big Bend Electric Cooperative had no operational SCADA system in place despite prior attempts in the early 2000s. With limited internal IT resources and growing system complexity, the utility needed a modern solution that wouldn’t burden its small team. Internal resistance – rooted in past project failures and concerns about the added security and maintenance demands of an on-premise setup – made it difficult to build momentum for deployment. Hosting their own SCADA system would have required specialized cybersecurity skills, ongoing server maintenance, patching, backups, and dedicated monitoring – resources the utility simply didn’t have.
The Solution
Survalent offered a cloud-hosted SCADA solution. This infrastructure-as-a-service model allows Big Bend to deploy a fully managed SCADA environment in Microsoft Azure. Hosting the system in the cloud eliminated the need for local server procurement, complex patching schedules, and 24/7 monitoring by internal IT staff. Survalent manages daily operations, updates, and backups while enabling secure site-to-site VPN connections and SMS-based alerting through TextPower. This approach removed many of the challenges typically associated with running SCADA on-premise, offering Big Bend a scalable and secure path to modernization.
Big Bend Electric Cooperative is a not-for-profit electric utility headquartered in Ritzville, Washington, with an operations center in Mesa, WA. Serving approximately 10,000 meters across 2,500 square miles in southeastern Washington, the cooperative was historically focused on irrigation but is now experiencing residential growth in its southern territory. BBEC is committed to enhancing system reliability and operational visibility as it expands its infrastructure and modernizes its grid.