We’re thrilled to announce that Cisco’s unified OT safety and networking structure is known as “Sensible Manufacturing Resolution of the 12 months” within the 2024 IoT Breakthrough Awards.

Industrial safety generally is a complicated enterprise, and but OT safety is quintessential for contemporary Industrial IoT (IIoT) operations. IIoT methods typically include quite a lot of interconnected methods 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, might not have the ability to dedicate ample time and personnel to safety, and IT groups usually don’t perceive operations properly sufficient. Potential manufacturing losses ensuing from elevated safety measures also can typically battle with the necessity to deal with safety issues.

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 supply solely a single safety operate. Clients are compelled to deploy level options that result in pointless {hardware} deluge, elevated complexity, and an total safety answer that doesn’t scale or ship.

An built-in community and safety structure

At Cisco we take an easier, scalable, and more practical method by integrating safety features straight into the community cloth. Our improvements allow the economic community to switch the various one-function level merchandise.

Determine 1: Cisco industrial switches and routers combine safety features and assist get rid of 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 companies on Cisco industrial switches and routers with out the necessity to introduce further {hardware}.

1. Visibility into related property, community site 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 might want to span site visitors out of your change ports, including to the community complexity and prices. Cisco Cyber Imaginative and prescient runs inside Cisco industrial units and performs the identical features with out the additional server, problems, and expense.

2. The second step as soon as visibility is established is to partition your operations into smaller divisions to include any malware which will discover its manner inside, however in a manner that permits professional site visitors to circulation unhindered. Historically, this community segmentation has been carried out 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

3. A 3rd necessity is to allow operations personnel to securely entry industrial property remotely. Historically, organizations have trusted options like VPNs that require frequent guide updates to firewall guidelines and soar server settings, probably unsecure strategies resembling mobile gateways, to call a number of. With the Safe Tools Entry answer, Cisco industrial community tools permits safe zero-trust community entry (ZTNA) by embedding ZTNA gateway performance with out the necessity for further 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 answer to be just right for you

We have now not solely designed an award-winning structure, however we now have additionally made it straightforward so that you can undertake it, assembly you in your safety journey the place you’re 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 check 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 every of our consultants.

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