From Cisco’s White Paper: “An Edge Architecture Approach to Securing Industrial IoT Networks”
Industrial networks are a target for cyberattacks. How can you protect them and ensure integrity, continuity, and safety of your operations?
We’ve teamed up with Cisco to help you gain visibility on your OT, understand your OT security posture, and drive OT security best practices.
With operational environments increasingly digitalizing and connecting to the IT environment, industrial organizations are recognizing the need to protect operational technology (OT) and industrial IoT against cyberattacks. Deploying firewalls to build a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between industrial networks and the IT domain is the mandatory first step. But as organizations connect more devices, enable more remote access, and build new applications, the airgap erodes and falls short of being sufficient.
Security solutions designed for industrial networks typically monitor network traffic to gain visibility on assets, behaviors, malicious activities, and threats. The process of evaluating and testing these solutions initially tends to go well – after a successful proof of concept, industrial organizations begin to deploy at scale. That’s where they begin to run into issues.
Often, it’s cost-prohibitive for organizations to buy the number of security appliances they need to cover their entire operational environment. Or, the networking team doesn’t have the resources to deploy, maintain, and manage a fleet of security appliances. The additional traffic created by these appliances would likely necessitate a separate network – which would also require the resources to deploy, maintain, and manage it.
Fortunately, there is a better approach to securing the OT environment. This paper introduces three architectural approaches available today, as well as an alternative that provides the visibility and security OT and IT teams need at scale, without requiring additional resources.
READ MORE: Download the white paper