SECURING INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS: NOT AN OPTION, A NECESSITY

With the growing threat of cyber invasion, having an end-to-end secure industrial environment is pivotal. The article elaborates on how manufacturing plants can secure their digital set-up effectively and why it is need of the hour.

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Industry 4.0 has been the buzzword among Indian manufacturers since they began their digitisation journey. A recent NASSCOM study found that 50 per cent of the tech spend by Indian manufacturers is on Industry 4.0 technologies amounting to $11.7 billion. And in the next 18-24 months, these manufacturers plan to increase investments emerging network tech, big data analytics, central and remote-controlled monitoring, and automation.

New methods of connectivity, external influences, new software development practices, and rapid cloud adoption have blurred the lines between IT and in OT. The widespread digitisation of industrial systems and the desire to connect and automate everything is now an unshakable reality. While it has increased the operational efficiency manifold, it also increased the attack surface of industrial environments.

And yet, the longstanding issue is that industrial environments still lag behind when it comes to maintaining cyber hygiene. This is because some organizations have not prioritised cybersecurity and are largely blind to unsecured environments being a strategic business risk. Historically, these organisations haven't had to think of interconnectivity or digitisation and the strategic business risks they pose, and they also haven't been regulated with cybersecurity in mind.

In the existing circumstances, the sheer volume of data and assets has become an exposure risk. Shadow IT, public cloud, ephemeral assets, distributed infrastructure and app deployments have made the attack surface transient. Its perhaps why manufacturers struggle to deal with the intersectionality of IT and OT infrastructure and face vulnerability overload. They have no way of knowing when changes are made to the environment and cannot detect active attacks.