UK Power Networks — Ofgem regulatory sign-off three months early, 60% vulnerability reduction in six months

Critical infrastructure regulation is binary: you meet the deadline or you do not. UK Power Networks met it three months early.

The challenge

UK Power Networks operates one of the largest electricity distribution networks in the UK, classified as critical national infrastructure and subject to Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive requirements assessed through Ofgem’s Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF). The organisation faced two intersecting pressures simultaneously: a formal NIS-CAF compliance programme requiring cross-functional coordination across cybersecurity, engineering, and field operations; and a data-team challenge in which roughly 70 live ServiceNow service requests were being manually copied into Azure DevOps daily, consuming a full-time equivalent of manual effort and breaking request-to-deployment traceability.

The Blu Wingu approach

Blu Wingu engaged across both strands in parallel — Principal Advisory Consultant on the NIS-CAF programme from December 2024 and integration lead on the ServiceNow–Azure DevOps programme from February 2025.

On the compliance programme, a cross-functional team of 12 cybersecurity, engineering, and operations specialists was coordinated through systematic maturity assessments across 30-plus critical network assets. Gap analysis identified 50-plus high-priority findings. A risk-based remediation roadmap sequenced effort by exposure level — risk reduction per unit of resource maximised before the regulatory deadline. Network segmentation improvements, vulnerability-management workflow redesign, and an incident-response playbook were the three structural interventions. Bespoke training workshops reached 200-plus stakeholders across executive leadership, IT, and field operations. The formal NIS Compliance Report was authored and submitted to Ofgem; full regulatory sign-off was returned three months before the deadline.

On the DevOps integration, Blu Wingu scoped, designed, and documented the target architecture across three C-level views plus sequence diagrams in a 35-page Solution Design Document. The integration connected ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0, Service Catalog, and Request Management to Azure DevOps Boards and Pipelines for a 13-person Enterprise Data team, eliminating manual copy-paste through bi-directional synchronisation via Flow Designer workflows and IntegrationHub spokes. Automated request-to-story conversion, webhook feedback loops, and team/area-path mapping handled routing to five Azure DevOps teams. Dashboards for request-to-deployment traceability, SLA-based delivery times, and Kanban health gave the team governance visibility it had previously lacked. The walk-through deck produced from stakeholder workshops was adopted as the programme blueprint.

The outcome

The NIS-CAF programme reduced UKPN’s high-risk exposure by 60% within six months and improved MTTD and MTTR by 45%. Full Ofgem regulatory sign-off was delivered three months ahead of deadline — a margin that materially reduces the organisation’s regulatory enforcement exposure. The ServiceNow–Azure DevOps integration eliminated the manual effort of processing approximately 70 daily requests, reduced request turnaround time by an estimated 30%, and positioned UKPN for enterprise-wide portfolio management on the ServiceNow platform.

What’s defensible

The 60% vulnerability reduction, 45% MTTD/MTTR improvement, three-month regulatory advance, and 30% turnaround-time reduction are programme-of-record outcomes traceable to the formal NIS Compliance Report submitted to Ofgem and the Solution Design Document adopted as the UKPN programme blueprint.

Cross-links: Regulatory Readiness