NRECA’s Journey to Centralized Risk Visibility and Action with Nucleus

• Customer: National Rural Electric Cooperative Assocaiation (NRECA)
• Industry: Electric Utilities
• Location: Arlington, VA

Business Impact

• Faster remediation of critical risks
• Improved collaboration across teams
• Improved efficiency with fewer fire drills and false positives

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is a nonprofit trade association representing nearly 900 rural electric cooperatives across the United States. These cooperatives provide power to approximately 42 million people, covering 56% of the nation’s landmass. NRECA’s mission is to power communities and empower members to improve the quality of their lives.

The Challenge: Siloed Tools, Misaligned Priorities

Before Nucleus, NRECA’s security and IT teams were constantly under pressure to respond to an overwhelming number of vulnerabilities, many of which were flagged as “critical” based solely on CVSS scores. In addition, external exposure and asset context were often missing. This made it impossible to rise above the data noise and make consistent and risk-informed decisions.

“There was a lot of data coming from different scanners and security tools … but if everything is critical, it means nothing is critical.”

-Masie Habib, Lead Security Engineer, NRECA

NRECA’s prioritization challenge was compounded by the fact that their CloudSec, AppSec, and IT teams were operating in silos, each with their own tools and workflows, drowning in millions of alerts that came from siloed tools without a single risk standard. Masie Habib, Lead Security Engineer at NRECA added, “A major focus for us was consolidation—bringing our exposure data and teams together into a single, unified platform.” The organization needed a solution that would be able to unify security operations across teams.

“One of the strongest things Nucleus did for us was help bring our teams together under one umbrella, all working with the same information. Prioritization became aligned. Our disparate security teams of CloudSec, AppSec, and network security were using different tools and getting different prioritization info. We had teams working toward common goals, but in different ways with different info. Now, they’re unified and working off the same standard of measurement.”
-Brandon Hilder, Cybersecurity Engineer, NRECA

Securing a decentralized network, with dozens of state agencies, posed many unique challenges:

1. Data Overload: Disparate security scanning tools generated vast amounts of vulnerability and exposure data, making timely analysis and assessment impossible using manual processes.
2. Emerging Threats: Rapid response to critical vulnerabilities, including zero-day threats, was impeded by the lack of unified threat intelligence across commercial and internal agency feeds.
3. Remediation Timelines: Manual processes and poor visibility prolonged exposure to high-risk vulnerabilities with remediation timelines regularly missing agency and leadership goals.

Key Selection Criteria

When NRECA began evaluating platforms, they looked for a platform that could connect all the tools in their security stack and aggregate the data. The team was also looking for a platform that allowed users to move from a high-level overview to a granular overview of risk scores. As Masie Habib described, “We wanted to start with that bird’s-eye view to see everything across the environment, narrow the data down into something easier to digest, and then be able to act on it.”

Additionally, the platform had to incorporate threat intelligence and asset context, enriching vulnerability data with external intelligence feeds such as CISA KEV and Google Threat Intelligence (previously Mandiant) to augment NRECA’s risk prioritization with real-world threat data.

The Solution: Nucleus Security Platform

To overcome fragmented processes and overwhelming data volume, NRECA selected Nucleus to serve as the unified backbone of its vulnerability management program. Nucleus ingests data from over 160 sources—including scanners, CMDBs, cloud APIs, and threat intelligence feeds—and consolidates it into a trusted, deduplicated view of assets, vulnerabilities, and risk.

“We are able to look at that bird’s eye view, narrow it down to something that is much easier to digest in terms of information, and then act on that.”
-Masie Habib, NRECA

With this scalable foundation, NRECA transitioned from CVSS-only scoring to a contextual risk model that accounts for exploitability, business impact, and asset sensitivity.

Nucleus’ automation framework then operationalized that context—automatically routing issues to the right teams, enforcing SLA policies, managing exceptions, and eliminating manual triage bottlenecks.

From Data Chaos to Focused Risk-Based Remediation

NRECA rolled out Nucleus with a clear security vision: to achieve enterprise-wide visibility across critical infrastructure, reduce organizational risk, and streamline remediation. With focus and stakeholder alignment, they were able to roll out a risk-based program with multiple integrations and diverse remediation teams. NRECA achieved three key outcomes with Nucleus: faster remediation of critical risks, stronger collaboration across teams, and fewer wasted resources on false positives.

Just as important, Nucleus helped NRECA unify previously siloed teams. NRECA’s CloudSec, AppSec, and network security teams were each using different tools and working from different prioritization models, which created confusion and inefficiencies despite shared goals. With Nucleus, all teams are now operating under a single platform, using the same risk data, scoring logic, and remediation workflows.

“Nucleus makes it clear what our top priorities are. When a true critical or high-risk issue appears in our environment, we immediately know where to focus our resources and get it resolved quickly.”
-Masie Habib, NRECA