You went over some of these things, but what are some helpful, cost-effective things that co-ops can do to address cybersecurity around DERs and EV supply equipment? And we can start with Cooper and then Carter, if you want to jump in.

again it's really important to have that secure network environment that's how people get into the environment whether or not you want them to or not so having any resource that you have connected via public internet really needs to have a firewall there to protect it's not good enough to have public internet circuit coming into a site with just some basic acls because attackers are going to hammer that all day and they may find a way in right So the best cost-effective solution we've found to be is utilizing private cellular.

So you can use carriers like a Verizon or an AT&T or whoever, but building that private network out within their environment and then having a secure gateway from your business environment into that environment is key.

Also locking down lateral communication.

So you don't want each individual DER site or any site out in the field really to communicate with another one, unless there's a business need and then you want to lock it down to just those basic parameters, right? So building out the private network and then also segmenting site by site is key.

And then the other thing that's the easy button too, for these, after you have that in place is making your next hop, your gateway for each one of those sites, your firewall at a data center or district office, whatever it may be so that you can control that traffic at that firewall, unless you have a firewall in the field, but generally A lot of the co-ops aren't putting firewalls out in each one of these sites because they're costly.

So the next best solution would be building that private network to get back to a location that you maintain a firewall with segmented networks.

And Cooper, talk about how generation and transmission statewide organizations such as North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation, how can they help co-ops manage costs and source cyber solutions in the DER space?