Operational Technology (OT) is the use of hardware and software systems to control and monitor the physical process and devices. This is typically found in all computer controlled manufacturing plants, and other heavy industries.
Traditionally, OT systems were completely separate from IT systems. However, IT and OT systems are not converging because of the need to improve performance, perform analytics and perform other checks that are typically done by the IT systems.
With this convergence, the security issues of IT systems have started affecting even the OT systems. The security of OT systems is of paramount importance because of the following reasons:
– Catastrophic Damages
The security of companies’ OT (Operational Technology) and ICS (Industrial Control Systems) is very crucial. Any compromise initiated to the ICS/OT operations could cause significant damages.
– Direct Financial Impacts
ICS consistently interact with heavy industrial systems directly. And any breach within the communication can result in loss of life and material. Plus, the problem can pose direct and visible impacts on financial results.
– Loss of Trust
Businesses can lose trust among its stakeholders by running afoul of compliance and regulatory requirements. Ultimately, losing the brand value and further complications connected to it.
– Competitive Advantage
Anything from unusual shutdowns, damage to the IT equipment, attacks on the intellectual property and even leading to competitive advantages are just a few examples of what the treats to OT/ITS can mean.
While IT refers to digital computing, OT is the cluster of all the computing systems responsible for managing industrial operations. For instance, Oil & Gas monitoring, manufacturing operations, Electric Utility Grid and more. ICS is the part of OT. And it encompasses SCADA and DCS.
Best Practices
Organizations must prepare themselves to address vulnerabilities affecting their business assets. While it might not be that simple, following some best practices can certainly boast your ICS/OT security.
– Keep discovering your assets in real-time. This includes everything whether within your corporate network reach or not. From wireless to wired.
– Measure what business risk each of your assets poses at different levels within your enterprise.
– Assess the behaviour of your devices. For instance, what are their use cases, what purpose they serve, what it connects to and more
– Continuously detect vulnerabilities and prioritise those within your OT assets
– Plan a robust management approach for consistently testing systems for vulnerabilities
– Keep improving your defence strategies
– Gap assessment
We Offer complete enhancement of your business’s event management, security planning and more
– Security review
We assess your network security and related anomalies to design robust security plans
– Monitoring
We actively connect OT devices to ICS devices to acquire their full identity information.
Masterstone team has expertise in mitigating threats and strengthening your OT/ITS security. We enhance the company’s visibility into vulnerabilities and threats lurking at ICS/OT and improve the detection and response tactics.
Here is what we do to keep your ICS/OT assets secure:
– Thorough Visibility of Assets and In-Depth Monitoring
For mapping existing inventories along with networks for OT assets and devices, we use multiple identification techniques. This helps us broaden our search manifold, eliminating any chances of discrepancies.
– Strong Expertise to Emulate Real-Time adversaries
We take pride in our ability to understand closely the real-world adversaries. With many experts on our side, we can think like hackers to mimic their techniques while employing the testing in a controlled and secure environment.
– Threat Detection and Response in Real-Time
Our focus is to bring automation into the picture, whether it’s threat detection or remediation. We do it through a mix of tools and solutions. Such as Dashboards for better user collaboration, alert and response tools and more.
– Helps Outline Boundaries Between Enterprise and Control Systems
Doing so, it becomes easier for businesses to address critical decisions such as which function will execute which tasks. And what information are safe for exchange between applications.
