We’re thrilled to announce that Cisco’s unified OT safety and networking structure is known as “Good Manufacturing Resolution of the 12 months” within the 2024 IoT Breakthrough Awards.
Industrial safety is usually a advanced endeavor, and but OT safety is quintessential for contemporary Industrial IoT (IIoT) operations. IIoT programs typically comprise a wide range of interconnected programs 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 assets, might not be capable to dedicate sufficient time and personnel to safety, and IT groups usually don’t perceive operations effectively sufficient. Potential manufacturing losses ensuing from elevated safety measures may typically battle with the necessity to handle safety considerations.
OT safety has, subsequently, historically been an afterthought and constructed utilizing a piecemeal method, counting on a patchwork of options offered by completely different distributors, every designed to offer solely a single safety perform. Clients are pressured to deploy level options that result in pointless {hardware} deluge, elevated complexity, and an general safety answer that doesn’t scale or ship.
An built-in community and safety structure
At Cisco we take a less complicated, scalable, and more practical method by integrating safety capabilities instantly into the community material. Our improvements allow the commercial community to switch the numerous one-function level merchandise.
Determine 1: Cisco industrial switches and routers combine safety capabilities and assist remove many separate merchandise
With a unified industrial safety and networking structure, Cisco brings simplicity and scale to each join and defend 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 linked property, community visitors, and assessing current asset vulnerabilities is acknowledged as step one in securing operations. Conventional safety distributors present a deep packet inspection (DPI) server for this function to which you’ll want to span visitors out of your swap ports, including to the community complexity and prices. Cisco Cyber Imaginative and prescient runs inside Cisco industrial units 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 industrial community into smaller segments to comprise any malware which will discover its manner inside, however in a manner that enables legit visitors to movement unhindered. Historically, this community segmentation has been achieved 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 guide ACLs.
Determine 2: Cisco industrial tools 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 guide updates to firewall guidelines and bounce server settings, doubtlessly unsecure strategies similar to mobile gateways, to call a number of. With the Safe Gear Entry answer, Cisco industrial community tools allows 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 function to activate in your Cisco industrial community.
Determine 3: Cisco industrial networking hosts a ZTNA gateway for safe distant entry
Put the award-winning answer to be just right for you
We’ve got not solely designed an award-winning structure, however we have now 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 strong 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 confer with the whitepaper, Harness the Energy of Networking to Safe Industrial Operations, or arrange a free no-obligation seek the advice of with considered one of our consultants.
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