Securing power infrastructure assets with an IoT solution

CLIENT: UTILITY COMPANY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Smart Locks Pro is a modern IoT solution for managing access to electrical and industrial enclosures and substations. Built for large enterprises operating critical infrastructure, it replaces physical keys with digital access control, real-time environmental conditions monitoring, and centralized oversight.

CHALLENGE

The client, one of the largest utility companies in the Middle East, owns a massive nationwide infrastructure – more than 700,000 substations and over 1 million distribution boxes. In 2023, they still relied on physical keys for accessing assets, and this caused significant operational and security problems. Thus, lost or misplaced keys could compromise multiple sites at once. Master keys posed an even greater risk – a single breach meant universal exposure across the entire estate.

Beyond this, the client needed to proactively monitor environmental conditions inside the assets. Stored electrical equipment could fail due to overheating or flooding, and these issues were discovered only later, after the damage had already been done.

SOLUTION

Bamboo Group built Smart Locks Pro, an IoT solution for access management and the prevention of equipment failures. Each lock device includes a comprehensive sensor suite: door opening, smoke detection, motion, thermal, and flood sensors. When conditions change or thresholds are exceeded, alerts are sent automatically to the monitoring centre and routed to the relevant personnel via email, SMS, push notification, or USSD.

Field technicians use a dedicated mobile application to interact with locks on site. Asset locking and unlocking is possible even in signal-poor locations via Bluetooth. The mobile app also displays live lock status, sensor readings, and asset locations via Google Maps.

The monitoring centre provides remote operators with full control over users and permissions, bulk lock management, maintenance task assignment, geomapped asset grouping, and detailed reporting and activity logs.