We’re thrilled to announce that Cisco’s unified OT safety and networking structure is called “Good Manufacturing Answer of the Yr” within the 2024 IoT Breakthrough Awards.
Industrial safety could be a advanced endeavor, and but OT safety is quintessential for contemporary Industrial IoT (IIoT) operations. IIoT programs usually include quite a lot 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, could not have the ability to dedicate satisfactory time and personnel to safety, and IT groups typically don’t perceive operations effectively sufficient. Potential manufacturing losses ensuing from elevated safety measures may also typically battle with the necessity to tackle safety issues.
OT safety has, due to this fact, historically been an afterthought and constructed utilizing a piecemeal method, 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 answer that doesn’t scale or ship.
An built-in community and safety structure
At Cisco we take a less complicated, scalable, and simpler method by integrating safety features straight into the community material. Our improvements allow the commercial community to switch the numerous one-function level 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 companies on Cisco industrial switches and routers with out the necessity to introduce further {hardware}.
- Visibility into linked belongings, community site 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 goal to which it is advisable span site 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 features 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 include any malware that will discover its means inside, however in a means that enables respectable site visitors to move 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 keep, or each. Native capabilities in Cisco Industrial Ethernet Switches permit dynamic and automatic a number of ranges of segmentation with out the firewalls or guide ACLs.
- A 3rd necessity is to allow operations personnel to securely entry industrial belongings remotely. Historically, organizations have trusted options like VPNs that require frequent guide updates to firewall guidelines and bounce server settings, probably unsecure strategies reminiscent of mobile gateways, to call a number of. With the Safe Gear Entry answer, Cisco industrial community gear 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.
Put the award-winning answer to be just right for you
We’ve got not solely designed an award-winning structure, however now we have additionally made it straightforward so that you can undertake it, assembly you in your safety journey the place you might be and guiding you progressively to the place you need to be. Our four-step course of can lead you from constructing a strong safety basis, via visibility, distant entry, and segmentation to incident reporting and response.
The community embedded safety structure scales throughout all OT use circumstances like manufacturing, transportation, utilities, oil & gasoline, 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 doable, 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 one in all our specialists.
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