Industrial Control Systems: Bringing Connectivity, Visibility and Security to Industrial Environments

Today, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are more connected to corporate IT networks than ever. With many organizations deploying new industrial devices into the environment, deep integration between IT, cloud, and industrial networks is creating many security challenges to digitization efforts.

Having visited multiple facilities over the last decade, the Genieall team observed common security gaps that make systems vulnerable to targeted attacks:

• Lack of network segregation
• Minimum to no visibility into OT environment
• Unprotected legacy systems
• Increasing risks from remote access requirements by vendors and staff
• Lack of cybersecurity mindset

Given that these security and connectivity challenges may expose the isolated OT environments to cyber threats, finding a unique solution that can ensure protection of critical assets is a priority. OT & IT leaders are on the lookout for solutions that are streamlined, automated, and extendable — ones that leverage the network they already know while providing the automation and security that free them up to work on the bigger challenges.

In this blog, we will look at solutions we offer to help optimize your industrial environments through rock solid infrastructure, unparalleled visibility and control, and trusted expertise. Partnering with major industrial connectivity and security vendors, we offer solutions to secure your infrastructure from legacy endpoints to networks and assets, provide full visibility into your IT/OT environment, and ensure connectivity and security of your OT networks.

Create an end-to-end network architecture with Cisco Industrial Networking

To connect your operational assets, you need a network that is highly available to avoid interruptions in your production. Your network needs to provide high bandwidth upstream so you can manage large amounts of data and make decisions in real time.

Cisco Industrial Networking is a full line of highly flexible, scalable, software-centric networking products purpose-built for outdoor and industrial spaces. It provides visibility and control to manage all network devices while ensuring security, and agility to continuously embrace change and drive innovation at scale.

Benefits:

• Secure and reliable industrial networks
• Integrated edge computing
• Purpose-built industrial hardware
• Integration with leading industrial automation vendors
• Common architectures and best practices across IT and OT networks
• Support for next-generation architectures such as SD-Access and SD-WAN for industrial environments

Securing industrial environment with Cisco Cyber Vision

Increasingly, over the past few years, industrial organizations have been looking for a solution to enhance the cybersecurity baseline of their industrial operations while ensuring compliance with regulations (EU NIS, NERC CIP, FDA, etc.)

Cisco Cyber Vision has been designed to provide full visibility into industrial networks, ensure process integrity, drive regulatory compliance, and enforce security policies to control risks. It is the ideal solution to feed your IT Security Operations Center (SOC) with OT context, so you can build a unified IT/OT cybersecurity architecture.

Benefits:

• Visibility embedded into your industrial network: Cyber Vision is embedded into your industrial network so you can see everything that connects to it in real time.
• Operational insights for OT: Maintain system integrity and production continuity. Cyber Vision keeps track of process data, asset modifications, and variable changes
• Holistic threat detection: Cyber Vision identifies known and emerging threats as well as process anomalies and unknown attacks by extending the IT Security Operations Center (SOC) to the OT domain.
• OT security you can deploy at scale: Cyber Vision leverages a unique edge computing architecture that enables security monitoring components to run within the industrial network equipment. No need to source dedicated appliances and build a dedicated out of band network.

Get full visibility and control of your industrial automation network with Cisco Industrial Network Director

It’s no secret that lack of visibility is a problem in industrial environments. Most organizations are simply not aware of the full scope of industrial assets connected to their networks. This in turn leads to poor network design, difficulty in detecting and fixing communication issues, and a lack of security in industrial networks.

The Cisco Industrial Network Director (IND) is an easy-to-adopt network management system for industrial automation. It is specifically designed to help operations teams manage automation by ensuring full visibility, availability and control of the industrial infrastructure.

Benefits:

• Reduce Unplanned Downtime by leveraging industrial protocols to discover and visualize how automation assets connect to the industrial network and troubleshoot issues with insightful context
• Simplify Commissioning with Plug-and-Play server functionality to enable machine builders and OEMs that may lack the required skills to configure machine networks according to best practises- without having to learn CLI.

Ensure complete ICS endpoint security with TXOne Stellar

TXOne Stellar’s signature-based engine and machine learning technology offer security across the all-terrain Industrial Control Systems, able to repel known and unknown attacks even in an air-gapped environment with no internet.

With trust listing only pre-registered applications and services can run, so that mission-critical systems are protected from malware with minimal impact on performance. Unlike traditional cybersecurity software, Stellar does not require internet connection, periodic updates, and regular malware scans.

Benefits:

• Legacy OS Protection: TXOne Stellar supports wide array of operating systems ranging from Windows 2000/2000 Server to Windows 10/Server 2019
• Industrial Control Systems Focus: Supports thousands of OT applications and OT vendors to increase compatibility, reduce false alarms, and protect critical OT tasks from harm
• High Performance: ICS application and certificate inventory filters out 90%+ files from the malware detection process
• High Efficacy: Advanced Threat Scanning blocks millions of types of known malware while machine learning automatically blocks unknown threats
• Low Maintenance Cost: Advanced Threat Scan patterns and machine learning modeling require updates only twice per year
• IOC Integration: Integrate with 3rd party threat intelligence to identify potential intrusions and malicious activity

When putting in place an industrial IT strategy, it is important to recognize that there is no “one size fits all”. This means it is critical that you work with your solution provider that understands the overall underlying IT infrastructure for industrial environments.

Every aspect of your infrastructure needs to work in unison to connect and protect your environment, without affecting operations, safety and efficiency.

At Genieall, we grant IT/OT wishes to our clients by deploying solutions that help to connect, secure, monitor and most importantly optimize their industrial environments. We understand that IT/OT infrastructure is fundamental to continued operations. Our team with extensive experience in Industrial Control Systems environments helps organizations to meet their network connectivity and security requirements, improve operational resiliency, gain visibility, and reduce OpEx costs.

We can make your IT/OT wishes come true!