Resilience is the company's ability to maintain critical functions in unexpected situations and to recover from them. For us, at its simplest, it is ensuring our ability to reliably deliver clean energy to our customers at scale. It is at the very core of our strategy. Fortum is a key player in the Nordic energy market and part of its critical energy infrastructure as we operate power plants which are essential to security of supply in Finland and Sweden. In addition, we have over 2 million retail customers across the Nordics. We understand our responsibility and take it very seriously.
Only as strong as our culture
Our resilience is only as strong as its foundation, which is built on basic security hygiene. To ensure the safe, reliable operations of our plants, we ensure the fundamentals are in place: access controls, locks, camera surveillance, crime detection systems to mention few.
The physical security only works if it is supported by a robust security culture. Our most important resource supporting safety is our people: constantly developing our security culture is paramount. The seemingly small and simple actions that are either done or not done everyday matter, such as making sure the door locks behind you, using privacy screens, reporting unsuspicious activities and just following our security ground rules.
Sharing situational awareness
Based on this foundation we secure the resilience of our production assets and are prepared to deal with exceptional situations. We can rarely completely prevent an attempted cyber-attack, for example, so we focus on early detection, mitigation of the impact and efficient recovery. We want to ensure that our operations continue running – no matter what happens.
We continuously monitor the security situation together with the authorities and private stakeholders working closely with them to ensure that any necessary security measures are based on risk assessments. Real time information sharing and well-established co-operation between the authorities, governmental agencies, businesses and third sector are the success factors of the comprehensive Finnish model of security.
Practice makes almost perfect
We regularly participate in crisis management exercises to improve our preparedness. We counted that during past couple of years we have been part of over 20 either local, national or international exercises. In addition, we also practice internally different situations, for example the use of our business continuity plans or communications in a crisis. Not to forget the individual level, related to for example cyber security awareness (how to spot phishing emails) or to yearly offerings of first aid trainings.
Going forward we will continue to build on our security culture and foundations. We will continue to practice to be prepared. And as a Nordic company, we welcome a low threshold of practical cooperation and information-sharing among stakeholders on critical energy infrastructure resilience across the Nordics.
