Prepare, Protect, Respond
Connie Lau is the CEO of Hawaiian Electric Industries.
PUF: As an industry leader on reliability and resilience, what motivated you to focus on this area and cybersecurity specifically among your many important responsibilities?
Connie Lau: For me, there are two main reasons: First, our largest customer is the U.S. military. Oahu is the headquarters for USINDOPACOM, the U.S. Indo-Pacific command, which watches more than half of the earth's surface for the United States from our small island of Oahu.
We're also host to the headquarters of all the component services, U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Pacific Air Forces, Marine Corps Forces Pacific, U.S. Army Pacific, and the U.S. Coast Guard that keep the region from the West Coast to India open and safe for U.S. citizens and our national interests in free trade and economic cooperation. The issue of security and resiliency is extremely important to them.
The second reason is because we run island utilities which are not interconnected to other large systems. We have grown up with a culture of wanting and needing to be resilient on our own ability to deliver reliable, affordable, power to our customers.
PUF: Yes, because each island is hyper dependent on its own resilience.