Industrial security can be a complex undertaking, and yet OT security is quintessential for modern Industrial IoT operations.
IIoT systems generally contain a variety of interconnected systems and technologies, each with its own security needs.
Some of these are older and not designed with modern security threats in mind.
OT teams, with their limited resources, may not be able to dedicate adequate time and personnel to security, and IT teams often do not understand operations well enough.
Potential production losses resulting from increased security measures can also sometimes conflict with the need to address security concerns.
OT security has traditionally been an afterthought and built using a piecemeal approach, relying on a patchwork of solutions provided by different vendors, each designed to provide only a single security function.
Customers are forced to deploy point solutions that lead to unnecessary hardware deluge, increased complexity, and an overall security solution that does not scale or deliver.
At Cisco we take a simpler, scalable, and more effective approach by integrating security functions directly into the network fabric.
Figure 1: Cisco industrial switches and routers integrate security functions and help eliminate many separate products.
With a unified industrial security and networking architecture, Cisco brings simplicity and scale to both connect and protect operations.
It reduces complexity by delivering visibility, segmentation, remote access, and other security services on Cisco industrial switches and routers without the need to introduce additional hardware.
Traditional security vendors provide a deep packet inspection server for this purpose to which you need to span traffic from your switch ports, adding to the network complexity and costs.
Cisco Cyber Vision runs within Cisco industrial devices and performs the same functions without the extra server, complications, and expense.
With the Secure Equipment Access solution, Cisco industrial network equipment enables secure zero-trust network access by embedding ZTNA gateway functionality without the need for extra servers.
Figure 3: Cisco industrial networking hosts a ZTNA gateway for secure remote access.
We have not only designed an award-winning architecture, but we have also made it easy for you to adopt it, meeting you in your security journey where you are and guiding you gradually to where you want to be.
Our four-step process can lead you from building a solid security foundation, through visibility, remote access, and segmentation to incident reporting and response.
Figure 4: Cisco four-step journey for industrial security.
The network embedded security architecture scales across all OT use cases like manufacturing, transportation, utilities, oil & gas, renewable power generation, and mining among others.
We are grateful to the IoT Breakthrough Award judges for recognizing the benefits of our integrated security and networking architecture.
This Cyber News was published on feedpress.me. Publication date: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 15:13:03 +0000