A clear and present threat is stalking your enterprise: Shadow AI, the unauthorized or unapproved use of AI in the workplace.

Enterprises and their employees are racing to adopt AI. But they're largely doing so without proper AI policies and governance structures. That means a rampant rise in shadow AI, and with it, a huge new category of enterprise risk that's already causing problems.

One headline raised an early alarm of the dangers: When ChatGPT went viral in early 2023, some employees at a major electronics company learned the hard way that the gen AI tool doesn’t keep secrets. They’d prompted the AI for assistance by feeding it sensitive corporate data, inadvertently exposing the data to potential use in responses to countless other users. The reputational damage was swift and severe, soon prompting several major financial institutions to ban the use of gen AI. 

Yet even now, few organizations are prepared to face the rising specter of shadow AI. This blog takes a closer look at the cyber risks, including data breach, IP theft, leaking confidential market intelligence, and compromised decision-making and the actions needed to defend your organization.

Highlighting the dangers of shadow AI

In 2006, shadow IT was an employee bringing their own thumb drive to work. By 2016, it was an employee bringing in SaaS tools like Google Drive and Slack, still without organizational oversight. 

Now in 2026, with the explosion of AI, those shadows have gotten much darker, and are more dangerous than ever.

Recent cloud security analysis found that roughly half (47%) of people using generative AI platforms are doing so through personal accounts that their companies aren’t overseeing. The number of incidents of users sending sensitive data to AI apps doubled in 2025. Yet 50% of organizations lack enforceable data protection policies for genAI apps.

That’s a serious gap considering the massive risks that come with unauthorized, unmonitored use of AI in an enterprise setting. Risks include:

1. Compromised decision-making. Ungoverned AI outputs can influence strategy and operations without transparency or validation, bringing bias, errors, or hidden assumptions into critical decisions. In financial services, for instance, inaccurate AI-driven forecasts could affect trading strategies or risk assessments.
   
2. Loss of intellectual property. Sharing proprietary materials or market-sensitive information with external AI tools can lead to IP exposure and competitive leakage. Manufacturing firms or logistics companies, for example, could inadvertently reveal trade secrets or supply chain plans.
   
3. Data exposure and breach risk. Unvetted AI use increases the chance of sensitive data leaving approved environments, including through user prompts or insecure integrations. With it, healthcare organizations risk patient privacy violations, while critical infrastructure operators could expose operational data.

Together these risks can and do affect financial performance, regulatory and contractual compliance, and organizational reputation.

How organizations can defend against shadow AI

AI governance should play a central role in de-risking these threats. But right now, AI adoption is significantly outpacing oversight. 

According to IBM research, 97% of AI-related security breaches involved AI systems that lacked proper access controls, and most breached organizations reported they have no governance policies in place to manage AI or prevent shadow AIt. 

Addressing the risks of ungoverned AI usage requires a multi-layered approach, including:

1. Emphasize collaboration with IT, security teams, and business units to understand AI capabilities and limitations. Well-coordinated teams can identify what AI tools are already in use and what data they interact with to understand who’s using what, where, how, when, and why. 
   
2. Develop an agile governance framework. Understanding the current landscape, you can then define the future of which AI systems may be used, how sensitive information is handled, and what training employees need on ethics and compliance.
   
3. Implement guardrails to ensure employees use only approved tools within defined parameters. These may include policies on external AI use, sandbox testing environments, or firewalls blocking unauthorized platforms.
   
4. Monitor AI usage with network tools, access controls, and audits to help track usage and identify risky or unauthorized activity. 
   
5. Remind people of the risks. Shadow AI evolves constantly, so ongoing communication is key.

Organizations can reduce shadow AI rates with governance, monitoring, and even cultural change. But those steps are only one part of a strong defense. 

Safeguarding your data from shadow AI

In addition to AI governance, zero trust networking can restrict unauthorized access to AI tools, and secure data shared with them. Meanwhile, edge computing and encryption keeps sensitive data on local devices, reducing the risk of external exposure to cloud-based AI.

Traditional approaches won’t cut it in a world of creeping shadow AI. With a proactive defense strategy, your team can bring shadow AI into the light to protect your IP, and your organization as a whole.

Ready to shield your systems from shadow AI? With watsonx as part of SanQtum AI, your organization can leverage watsonx.governance to keep stricter, tighter control of AI models, agents, and overall use.

Featuring Available’s SanQtum solutions stack, the deployment will span 100 major US cities and combine zero trust, quantum-secure networking with edge AI inference capability. Available’s newest strategic partner, Strata Expanse, will leverage the system for the Amphix™ AI Infrastructure Platform.

Tysons Corner, Va. — 16 March 2026 — AI infrastructure and cybersecurity company Available Infrastructure (Available) today announced Project Qestrel, a nationwide fleet of cybersecure, private neocloud edge data centers. The initial phase, to be live by the end of 2026, will span 1,000 individual sites across 100 US cities and more than 30 US states from coast to coast, representing nearly $5 billion in project CapEx at full buildout. 

Each site will feature full-stack edge deployments of Available's trio of SanQtum solutions: zero trust network, high-performance compute (HPC) infrastructure, and AI inference capability. The first sites are already live, with 30 cities targeted to come online by early July thanks to a partnership with wireless infrastructure company Crown Castle. Available’s newest strategic partner, Strata Expanse, will leverage the system for the Amphix AI Infrastructure Platform (Amphix), bringing edge AI, ultra-low-latency speed, strengthened cybersecurity, and expanded compute capacity to its customers. 

As the industry sees data and AI rapidly moving to the edge and hybrid cloud and neocloud architectures growing quickly, Project Qestrel and Available’s SanQtum solutions stack provide critical protections and benefits:

• Sovereignty: The Available fleet’s sovereign, edge-first architecture keeps data local to where it is created and where decisions are made, allowing for greater protection of sensitive data and adherence to data residency requirements.
• Security: A zero trust approach and quantum-resilient encryption protect against emerging cyber threats, including "harvest now, decrypt later” attacks and the nearing threat of Q Day from mature quantum computers.
• Latency: HPC at the edge enables ultra-low-latency AI applications for mission-critical use cases that cannot afford the roundtrip latency of pinging to the traditional cloud and back, such as public safety, power grid management, and smart cities.
• Capacity: Available's air-cooled, power-ready sites can come online in weeks to months, not years. For government agencies, enterprises, and data center operators, Available's urban clusters provide a pathway to scale up additional AI capacity essentially overnight versus the speed-to-market delays many hyperscalers are facing from interconnection queue delays, supply chain constraints, and power constraints.

“We believe this is truly the future of AI inference — a future that will be defined by speed, location, and security,” said Dan Gregory, CEO of Available. “By deploying SanQtum from coast to coast, Project Qestrel is bringing powerful AI inference to the US market when it’s needed, where it’s needed, and all within a zero trust network with quantum-resilient cyber protections."

Each of the 1,000 deployments will be co-located at telecom sites, with immediate access to both fiber and power. The fleet’s neocloud architecture will run up to 48 GPUs per site, bringing AI inference out of distant hyperscaler data centers and right to the edge, close to where decisions need to be made quickly. Many of the sites will be pre-integrated with IBM’s watsonx, providing trusted, enterprise-grade AI for users from day one. (Available is an IBM Platinum Partner.) Other sites will be AI-agnostic, capable of running other AI inference models as needed.

Amphix — founded by real estate investment trust and data center infrastructure developer Strata Expanse, intelligent AI orchestration partner RAVEL, and Available — will leverage the network as part of its nationwide rollout. Available’s upcoming deployment will bring Amphix’s total footprint directly to the edge in US cities most in need of fast, reliable computing power. Every Amphix site will also now benefit from SanQtum’s cybersecurity protections.

“Strata’s model allows users to capture an important array of benefits, from flexibility to security to cost efficiency. By leveraging Available’s system, we’re layering on industry-leading cyber protection while extending our HPC and AI capacity to the edge,” said Ellen Taylor, CRO & Senior Vice President of Origination at Strata Expanse. “While some tasks, like AI training workloads, can and should be housed at our larger ‘home base’ data centers, critical AI inference can now operate exactly where it’s needed with ultra-low latency. We are thrilled about what this new partnership will make possible.”  

The first customer to announce its use of Available’s distributed fleet was Datavault AI, working in partnership with IBM. The company recently announced initial adoption in the New York and Philadelphia corridors, with nationwide rollout to come.

Nathaniel Bradley, CEO of Datavault AI, shared, “The added speed and security that Available’s SanQtum solutions bring to the table are vitally important to our latest offerings — like real-time data scoring, tokenization, and monetization — which we believe have the power to unlock an all new category of value for enterprise users.” 

To learn more about Project Qestrel and Available’s SanQtum solutions, or to connect with the Available team, send a message here.

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About Available Infrastructure
Based in Northern Virginia along the Washington, DC, beltway, Available Infrastructure offers cybersecure zero trust networking, HPC neocloud infrastructure, and enterprise-grade AI — all private, sovereign, and at the edge. This unique combination supports critical infrastructure, sensitive data, and AI models for agencies, enterprises, and institutions.

Available is also the owner-operator of a growing nationwide fleet of AI-powered, quantum-ready, distributed micro data centers with national security-grade cyber protection. We are bringing the next generation of pure edge infrastructure to the market, while enhancing the offerings of hybrid cloud providers and traditional data centers. Available Infrastructure is an IBM Platinum Partner.

For more information, visit www.availableinfrastructure.com. 

About Strata Expanse 
Strata Expanse develops land and delivers the power, cooling, and secure connectivity that enable data center operators to deploy high-performance compute within infrastructure-ready environments at speed and scale. Infrastructure is delivered through the company’s Gray Space as a Service™ subscription model. Structured as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), Strata Expanse focuses on energy-first site selection and integrated infrastructure development. 

Learn more at StrataExpanse.com. 

Media Contact
Nikki Arnone
Inflection Point Agency for Available
nikki@inflectionpointagency.com

Q Day is the moment in time — coming far sooner than later — when quantum computers become sufficiently mature at enough scale to crack the encryption algorithms that protect the majority of our data today. Cybersecurity authorities are warning that migration to quantum-resilient systems must begin now, given how quickly AI is advancing quantum capability. 

By 2030, even today’s most robust encryption systems will be no match for quantum capabilities. This has profound implications for modern life as we know it. The safety of financial institutions and fiat and crypto currencies all face imminent risk. Government secrets, company IP, private health information – all could instantly be exposed. The World Economic Forum noted that “all regulations and laws regarding privacy, data management etc. would be impossible to uphold,” significantly eroding public trust.

Nothing that's encrypted with today's algorithms will be safe from quantum computers. It’s a sobering message that should, rightfully, stoke fear — and motivate action: Now is the time to protect yourself, your systems, and your data with quantum-resilient encryption.  That starts with a baseline understanding of the power of quantum computing. 

What is quantum computing?

Quantum computing (and the QPUs it runs on) are significantly more powerful than the CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs of today's computers and data centers. That's because of how quantum computers work; they take advantage of quantum mechanics, probabilities, and superpositions at the atomic and subatomic level.

Think of this way: traditional computing relies on binary (a coin flip of 1 or 0, or classical bits); quantum computing is like flicking the coin so that it spins on end, with an incredible number of possible positions (qubits). This makes quantum computers especially good at solving certain problems and undertaking certain computations... including cracking encryption.

Until recently, quantum computing has been in the R&D phase. Why? Regardless of their technology — cryogenic superconductors, trapped-ion, or photonic — building large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers is complicated and expensive. That means that only a handful of powerful nation-states (e.g., USA, China), major research universities, and major tech companies (IBM, Google) have been investing in its development. 

But now commercial availability is sprinting ever closer. And with it, Q Day.

What is Q Day?

Q-Day refers to the point when quantum computers become powerful enough to break the encryption systems that safeguard today’s digital world. 

Few sectors would be untouched once those defenses fall. Most secure systems — including banks, communications networks, and especially blockchains — rely on RSA and elliptic-curve encryption, both of which could be unraveled once quantum machines reach sufficient scale. 

Among them, blockchain networks may face the steepest test, since their open, transparent design could make digital assets uniquely vulnerable once quantum decryption becomes possible. Q-Day could then upend the foundation of cryptocurrency security. Because blockchains rely on digital signatures, a powerful quantum computer could theoretically extract private keys from public ones, allowing hackers to seize funds. 

Mati Greenspan, Founder of Quantum Economics, warned that when that day comes, “many blockchains won’t survive,” though he noted that some projects are already adapting for a post-quantum era — a shift he believes will “define the next era of digital ownership.” 

An estimated 25 million Bitcoin addresses currently hold more than $100 in value, and Aixiv’s Quantum report estimates it could take six to twelve months to migrate those funds to quantum-safe wallets, according to research cited in Forbes.

And Q Day is coming sooner than later, with AI now accelerating its progress by helping researchers model and characterize the vast complexity of quantum systems. These AI models — spanning machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based approaches — can approximate the state of massively complex quantum systems, allowing scientists to bypass the exponential scaling hurdles that have long limited quantum research.

By predicting physical properties like magnetization and entropy, AI tools act as surrogates that speed up testing, verification, and optimization of quantum hardware. This capability is vital for advancing quantum computing applications in encryption, materials discovery, and pharmaceuticals. 

Because AI enables faster characterization and optimization, it shortens the timeline to practical quantum computing, effectively bringing Q-Day closer.

When is Q Day coming?

As recently as 2022, an estimate from experts in the field predicted an average of 15 years until Q day would hit — ie, 2037. Since then the date is pulling closer and closer to the present. 

Expert forecasts on timing vary, but most agree it’s coming sooner than later. A 2025 analysis from PostQuantum projects a machine capable of breaking RSA-2048 by around 2030, give or take two years. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that Y2Q will arrive on or around Jan. 1, 2031. An industry survey shows 61% of security professionals believe current encryption could be compromised within two years, and another 28% expect cracks within three to five years.

In other words, the runway to Q Day has been cut in half. We know this because of the key milestones that have already been hit. As described in Post Quantum analysis, these include:

• A new factoring algorithm developed by Google shrank the qubit count needed to factor RSA-2048.
• Oxford physicists at Oxford achieved a record-breaking low error rate in quantum operations (only 1 error in 6.7 million).
• IBM produced a roadmap promising a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, years ahead of expectations.

That leaves one milestone yet to reach: cracking RSA-2048.

What’s at risk the moment Q Day hits

Q-Day would mean that most of the world’s existing encryption systems could be broken, rendering most common data security strategies instantly obsolete and threatening the security of the global digital economy. 

Critical systems that depend on RSA security and elliptic-curve cryptography — such as financial transactions, blockchain operations, and secure communications — would be vulnerable to quantum decryption. 

The arrival of quantum computers capable of this feat would undermine trust in digital systems and compromise sensitive data at every level, from individuals to governments, and across critical infrastructure sectors like transportation, food and ag, energy, and government and defense.

Cybersecurity authorities are advising organizations to move swiftly to invest in post-quantum encryption. For example, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre advises migration to quantum-safe systems by 2028, with full adoption by 2035. 

In the USA, a bipartisan bill has been proposed to ensure the federal government prepares for encryption-breaking quantum computers. Meanwhile the NSA has been warning for years about “harvest now, decrypt later” strategies, in which attackers capture encrypted data today with the expectation of decrypting it once quantum computing becomes powerful enough. 

“The world will either suffer unimaginable financial, security, and technological catastrophes that taken together will be an order of magnitude worse than cybercrime, which is estimated to cost the world $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025,” said Steve Morgan, editor-in-chief at Cybercrime Magazine of Q Day. “OR the world will be a much safer place.” 

How SanQtum keeps your data and systems safe from Q Day risks

As AI accelerates quantum development, the timeline for safe reliance on today’s encryption methods is shrinking, creating pressure for early adoption of quantum-resilient standards.

SanQtum delivers that protection with new quantum-safe algorithms. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has released Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) publications for three quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. Two of the standards (ML-KEM and ML-DSA) were developed by IBM Research cryptography researchers in Zurich with external collaborators, and the third (SLH-DSA) was co-developed by a scientist who has since joined IBM Research. 

SanQtum provides zero-trust network architecture with quantum-resilient encryption, offered as a plug-and-play service so customers can scale rapidly. Our NIST-approved quantum-resilient encryption keeps your organization’s information secure — both data in transit and at rest — including against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks and the dawn of Q Day.

Ready to prepare for Q Day? Let’s discuss how SanQtum can help defend your organization from the fast-approaching threat.

Trusted edge AI now a reality, offered as a fully integrated, fully managed solution

TYSONS CORNER, Va. – December 19, 2025 – Available Infrastructure today announced that its cybersecurity solution, SanQtum AI, is advancing the mission to “make AI available” by protecting IBM's watsonx AI and data platform. IBM will offer this fully integrated Platform as a Service directly to help governments, enterprises, and other partners achieve sovereign AI at the edge, where it’s needed most. SanQtum AI embeds IBM's trusted watsonx stack with Available's zero trust, quantum-resistant edge infrastructure. The result is the most secure and performant AI and data platform on the market — one that gets past power requirements, delivers ultra-low latency, and strengthens connectivity to enable faster decision-making at machine speed. 

As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, keeping models safe and secure from poisoning is non-negotiable. Cyber attack risk already looms large for any and all cyber-physical systems, with the cost of cybercrime projected to nearly triple by 2027. Quantum attacks pose a fast-dawning threat, too, with Q Day on the horizon and “harvest now, decrypt later" attacks already well underway. 

In an environment defined by accelerating threats, the path to unlocking the future of AI runs through a robust edge installation strategy, where cloud and edge inferencing work in concert to enable real-time performance and resilient operations across diverse settings. 

Available Infrastructure engineered SanQtum AI to deliver maximum protection, faster and easier. SanQtum AI delivers a solid, safe, efficient path to an AI-driven enterprise, bundling IBM-trusted solutions to defend against model poisoning, quantum attacks, and other vulnerabilities. IBM’s watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance deliver accurate, defensible AI with built-in auditability; the SanQtum network adds security-grade controls like policy enforcement, access control, continuous monitoring, and tamper-resistant logging, so teams can validate outputs and stand up to adversarial and cyber threats. 

This is defensible AI at its best delivered in a sovereign, secure environment. It supports organizations in building an environment for the long term, while protecting investments in data and IP from nation-state attacks and other threats. With micro-edge data centers delivering decentralized AI and neo cloud architecture, SanQtum AI enables real-time response and reduced data management costs.

SanQtum AI features include:

• OPERATIONAL: get AI compute capacity online now (via on-prem and edge instances) vs. years-long backlogs for hyperscaler data centers
• SPEED: ultra-low latency when milliseconds matter, thanks to data and AI models residing at the edge
• SECURITY: zero trust architecture and quantum-resilient encryption mean AI models, data at rest, and data in transit are secure
• SCALABLE: offered as a service, so agencies and enterprises can easily adopt and scale as OpEx on their balance sheet
• TRUSTED: delivered and warrantied directly by IBM, with Available's cutting-edge tech powering the cybersecurityFull watsonx solution Zero Trust protection, end to end for data, models, system, and users wastonx.governance

“Including SanQtum AI in IBM’s native solutions offerings marks a significant milestone in our joint effort to protect the sectors that shape our modern world,” said Daniel Gregory, CEO of Available. “As an IBM embedded Platinum Partner, we are proud to combine the power of our cybersecurity solution with watsonx to help more organizations safeguard their path to an AI-driven enterprise.”

To learn more about SanQtum AI, and to contact the Available team, visit www.availableinfrastructure.com.

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About Available Infrastructure
Based in Northern Virginia along the Washington, DC, beltway, Available Infrastructure combines national security-grade cyber protection and AI-powered, quantum-ready edge computing into an integrated solution for critical infrastructure, sensitive data, and enterprise AI models. In today's and tomorrow's evolving landscape, this unique combination keeps operational technology (OT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) safer, while delivering a decision-making advantage for agencies, enterprises, and institutions. Available unites distinct business units — Available Networks and Available Power — and builds upon their deep experience in power grids, infrastructure development, zero trust networking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

To learn more visit www.availableinfrastructure.com.

Media Contact
Nikki Arnone, Inflection Point Agency for Available Infrastructure
719-357-8344
nikki@inflectionpointagency.com

AI adoption is swiftly outpacing security and governance — leaving organizations in high-risk industries like healthcare, energy, industrial, financial, government, manufacturing, and transportation and logistics increasingly exposed to expensive, dangerous, and disruptive data breaches. The US government's Cyber Threat Snapshot from November 2024 shows that cyber attacks on critical infrastructure were up 30% globally last year.

While traditional cyberattacks continue to play out, a concerning new theme is fast emerging: AI as both a tool for attack and a target of those attacks.

According to IBM’s new Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, 1 in 6 data breaches involve AI-driven attacks, most often phishing or deepfake impersonation attacks. The 2025 report also shows that weak cybersecurity around organizational AI use is actively being exploited. More than 1 out of every 8 attacks are now targeting AI models and apps themselves — a number that’s rising as AI becomes a high-value target.

Five key themes in today’s AI-related data breaches

The 2025 report, conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored and analyzed by IBM, is based on data breaches experienced by 600 organizations globally from March 2024 through February 2025. Here are five key themes revealed in the report:

1. All sectors are at risk. Healthcare, financial, industrial, energy, and technology are all experiencing more breaches — and those breaches are getting costlier.
   
2. Attacks are targeting AI models. As more organizations adopt AI, their AI models are becoming the focus of cyber threats. Security incidents that targeted AI models and applications were varied, but one type clearly claimed the top ranking: supply chain compromise, which includes compromised third-party apps, APIs, and plug-ins. Other prevalent forms of attacks on AI systems include: model inversion, which aims to learn sensitive information about the model itself, such as its weights or training data; model evasion, which manipulates input data to deceive a model into producing a desired output or outcome; prompt injection, which manipulates a model’s behavior by inserting hidden or malicious instructions into its input; and data poisoning, which corrupts a model by tampering with the data it learns from.
   
3. Consequences are mounting. Nearly all organizations suffered operational disruption following a breach. Then there’s the financial and reputational impact. The three biggest attack vectors — phishing, supply chain compromise, and malicious insiders — each come with a cost per breach close to $5 million. Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 5 businesses experienced reputational damage and loss of goodwill due to an AI-related breach.
   
4. 97% of companies that experienced an AI-related incident lack basic AI access controls. The overwhelming majority of organizations have no regulations or policies governing how people use AI across the enterprise. This makes organizational intellectual property (IP) data an easy target, especially in environments with lax access controls, over-permissioned accounts, limited visibility into who can access what, and use of shadow AI by employees.
   
5. Most breaches targeted company IP and customer data. One-third of cyberattacks targeted company IP. More than half targeted customer PII. Moreover, roughly one-third of organizations that experienced an incident reported loss of data integrity due to an incident involving an AI model or app.
   

Why national-security grade protection is more important than ever 

While AI is both a tool hackers are using and a target of their attacks, AI is also a part of defense against those attacks.

As IBM’s recent report found, strategic AI deployment is critical for cyber protection and response — enabling faster identification, containment, and lower breach costs. Using AI and automation across operations like prevention, detection, investigation, and response saved $1.9 million in average breach costs and reduced the breach lifecycle by ~80 days. This represents a 28% decrease in mean time to identify (MTTI) + mean time to contain (MTTC).

But the best cybersecurity approaches go above and beyond AI, using zero trust architecture to prevent breach in the first place, keep AI models secure, and avoid operational disruption. “It’s not just about dollars. It’s downtime, reputation, lost trust,” said Jeff Crume, Senior Engineer, IBM. “And the fact is that many of these breaches are preventable.”

As an IBM Platinum Partner, we know that achieving a secure zero-trust posture is not optional — it’s critical for the implementation of trusted enterprise AI. With our fully pre-integrated Platform-as-a-Service, SanQtum, organizations across the public and private sector can achieve rapid, maximum protection in today’s fast-changing threat landscape. 

Image: Unsplash | Sean Pollock

Tysons Corner, VA — 30 July 2025 — Today, Available Infrastructure (“Available”) announced it has been awarded a United States patent for a cybersecurity solution to protect energy assets and other critical infrastructure from cyber threats.

The solution utilizes a firewall gateway as a secure checkpoint that monitors incoming communications trying to interact with and control energy infrastructure, locking out access if it detects unapproved or malicious attempts.

This helps prevent cyberattacks and ensures the safe, reliable operation of critical infrastructure like distributed energy resources (DERs), electric vehicle (EV) charging, virtual power plants (VPPs), energy management systems, and industrial control equipment.

“This patent represents an important step forward in protecting the technologies that power our modern world, from grid technology to industrial systems,” said Daniel Gregory, CEO of Available. “As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, this firewall gateway technology offers a purpose-built solution to help secure essential infrastructure at every turn.”

To learn more about Available or to contact the team, visit www.availableinfrastructure.com. 

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About Available Infrastructure
Based in Northern Virginia along the Washington, DC, beltway, Available Infrastructure (Available) brings together three cornerstone solutions for operational technology (OT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS): zero trust networking for national security-grade cyber protection, IBM watsonx for enterprise AI at the edge, and battery energy storage systems for clean, resilient power.

In today’s and tomorrow’s evolving landscape, this unique combination keeps critical infrastructure and sensitive data safer, while delivering a decision-making advantage for agencies, enterprises, and institutions. Available is the owner-operator of a fast-growing nationwide fleet of quantum-ready micro edge data centers. It is also the parent company uniting two subsidiary, sister business units — Available Networks and Available Power — and is an IBM Platinum Partner.

The Available family of companies brings together deep experience in power grids, infrastructure development, zero trust networking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

To learn more visit www.availableinfrastructure.com.

Media Contacts

Nikki Arnone
Inflection Point Agency for Available Infrastructure
nikki@inflectionpointagency.com 

For the better part of a decade, industry voices have been heralding battery energy storage system (BESS) technologies as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of the power grid.

Indeed, batteries have shown themselves capable of providing valuable services ranging from backup power to frequency response to demand charge management to replacing gas peakers plants to renewables integration and mitigating renewable curtailment. In their most recent ‘world first,’ last year in Australia large batteries provided grid-scale inertia services.

Yet as BESS technology has matured and as their economics have been competitive with (and increasingly, superior to) traditional power grid solutions, they are on the verge of fundamentally flipping how the grid operates altogether. Industry trade media’s preoccupation with spotlighting the latest ‘shiny’ achievement of batteries misses seeing the forest for the trees.

FROM REACTIVE LOAD-FOLLOWING GENERATORS TO A FUNGIBLE ‘ELECTRON INVENTORY’

During the prior century, so-called “traditional” grid balancing involved starting with predictable demand, then pairing that with baseload thermal power — supplemented with modest-ramping, load-following gas peakers when needed.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, times have changed. “Modern” grid balancing now involves increasingly dynamic and peaky demand, paired with growing contributions of variable supply-side renewable generation (especially wind and solar PV), resulting in reliance on strained, expensive, polluting fast-ramping fossil peakers.

Now, times are ready to change again. Batteries are staged to forever shift how we think about (and actually execute) grid operations, thanks to their unique ability to serve as an always-ready, fungible ‘electron inventory’ that can equally serve supply- and demand-side power grid needs.

THE GRID GETS A SUPPLY-SIDE ‘SLUSH FUND’

The status quo for ensuring sufficient supply-side capacity to meet forecasted demand means there are required minimum spinning reserves, waiting to get connected to the grid. These peakers are essentially sitting ‘idle’ in the wings — like soccer players warming up along the sideline in the recent FIFA World Cup — waiting to get called into the game and ramp up.

Meanwhile, solar and wind inject power when they’re generating — in part thanks to their priority position as zero-marginal-cost generators in the dispatch stack — but they also have to throw away perfectly good electrons via curtailment when there’s not enough demand to absorb that supply.

In the unfolding new era of a battery-centric electricity grid paradigm, batteries serve as an always-ready, always-connected ‘slush fund’ that continually stocks the grid’s electron inventory with a generation-agnostic power ‘bank.’ The implications are far-reaching.

For example, instead of ramping up gas peakers — a costly and dirtier way to run the grid — those power plants can run at a more-efficient, less-polluting steady state, pumping their electrons into waiting batteries that can then respond and discharge that energy when grid demand starts rising.

For another example, with massive proliferation of smart, IoT-connected distributed energy resources (DERs), we’re seeing more demand response and DERMS programs aimed at trying to absorb excess renewable generation and reduce solar and wind curtailment. Instead, batteries can absorb those green electrons like a sponge and release them back onto the grid as demand is ready for it.

READY FOR EVS AND THE RISE OF ‘ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING’

On the demand side, in the coming years the grid is going to see more demand than it ever has, in no small part due to the ‘electrify everything’ movement. Electrification will soon touch every facet of everyday life: induction cooktops, grid-interactive water heaters, electric air-source heat pumps, and of course, electric vehicles (EVs).

EVs are a great case in point: a new electrified technology that represents not just huge amounts of new aggregate load, but also big spikes in demand over very short periods of time as EVs plug and unplug from fast-charging stations. The old school power grid management approach isn’t designed for those types of near-instantaneous, massive load fluctuations; batteries are.

We’ve already seen growing instances of EVSE operators installing battery banks co-located with their charging stations, in order to buffer the grid from such impacts. Yet a grid rewired and redesigned around battery energy storage technology altogether becomes purpose-built for the new reality, rather than being retrofitted to accommodate EVs and the rest of ‘electrify everything.’

CONCLUSION

It’s time to stop talking in the future tense about the technical potential of what batteries could do for the grid. It’s also time to move beyond celebrating each new battery ‘first,’ like last year’s story out of Australia.

BESS is now at a point of technological maturity and coming down the cost curves into competitive economics, such that we should instead be thinking harder and differently about how we operate the grid in a battery-enabled brave new world. That’s what we’re doing here at Available Power. We invite you to join us.