We’re thrilled to announce that Cisco’s unified OT safety and networking structure is called “Sensible Manufacturing Answer of the Yr” within the 2024 IoT Breakthrough Awards.
Industrial safety generally is a complicated endeavor, and but OT safety is quintessential for contemporary Industrial IoT (IIoT) operations. IIoT techniques typically comprise a wide range of interconnected techniques and applied sciences, every with its personal safety wants. A few of these are older and never designed with fashionable safety threats in thoughts. Moreover, OT groups, with their restricted sources, could not be capable to dedicate satisfactory time and personnel to safety, and IT groups usually don’t perceive operations nicely sufficient. Potential manufacturing losses ensuing from elevated safety measures may typically battle with the necessity to handle safety issues.
OT safety has, due to this fact, historically been an afterthought and constructed utilizing a piecemeal strategy, counting on a patchwork of options supplied by completely different distributors, every designed to supply solely a single safety perform. Prospects are pressured to deploy level options that result in pointless {hardware} deluge, elevated complexity, and an general safety resolution that doesn’t scale or ship.
An built-in community and safety structure
At Cisco we take an easier, scalable, and simpler strategy by integrating safety capabilities straight into the community material. Our improvements allow the economic community to switch the various one-function level merchandise.
Determine 1: Cisco industrial switches and routers combine safety capabilities and assist eradicate many separate merchandise
With a unified industrial safety and networking structure, Cisco brings simplicity and scale to each join and shield operations. It reduces complexity by delivering visibility, segmentation, distant entry, and different safety providers on Cisco industrial switches and routers with out the necessity to introduce extra {hardware}.
- Visibility into related property, community visitors, and assessing current vulnerabilities is acknowledged as step one in securing operations. Conventional safety distributors present a deep packet inspection (DPI) server for this objective to which you could span visitors out of your change ports, including to the community complexity and prices. Cisco Cyber Imaginative and prescient runs inside Cisco industrial gadgets and performs the identical capabilities with out the additional server, issues, and expense.
- The second step as soon as visibility is established is to partition your operations into smaller divisions to comprise any malware that will discover its method inside, however in a method that enables authentic visitors to circulate unhindered. Historically, this community segmentation has been performed with units of firewalls or Entry Management Lists (ACL) configuration in switches. Each are both costly, troublesome to get proper and preserve, or each. Native capabilities in Cisco Industrial Ethernet Switches enable dynamic and automatic a number of ranges of segmentation with out the firewalls or handbook ACLs.
Determine 2: Cisco industrial gear runs Cyber Imaginative and prescient for visibility and segmentation insurance policies
- A 3rd necessity is to allow operations personnel to securely entry industrial property remotely. Historically, organizations have relied on options like VPNs that require frequent handbook updates to firewall guidelines and soar server settings, doubtlessly unsecure strategies akin to mobile gateways, to call a couple of. With the Safe Gear Entry resolution, Cisco industrial community gear permits safe zero-trust community entry (ZTNA) by embedding ZTNA gateway performance with out the necessity for additional servers. Enabling distant entry is now only a software program characteristic to activate in your Cisco industrial community.
Determine 3: Cisco industrial networking hosts a ZTNA gateway for safe distant entry
Put the award-winning resolution to be just right for you
We’ve not solely designed an award-winning structure, however we now have additionally made it simple so that you can undertake it, assembly you in your safety journey the place you might be and guiding you steadily to the place you need to be. Our four-step course of can lead you from constructing a stable safety basis, by way of visibility, distant entry, and segmentation to incident reporting and response.
Determine 4: Cisco four-step journey for industrial safety
The community embedded safety structure scales throughout all OT use instances like manufacturing, transportation, utilities, oil & fuel, renewable energy technology, and mining amongst others.
We’re grateful to the IoT Breakthrough Award judges for recognizing the advantages of our built-in safety and networking structure.
For extra particulars and to find what’s attainable, please seek advice from the whitepaper, Harness the Energy of Networking to Safe Industrial Operations, or arrange a free no-obligation seek the advice of with certainly one of our consultants.
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