When working to protect IT systems, we aim to protect data, including intellectual property, credit card numbers, emails and other information valuable for a company. This contrasts sharply with ICS systems, where the main objective is to protect the process. An unplanned shutdown of a plant can take days, weeks or even months to restart, causing extensive damage.
The recent geopolitical instability has led to a splash in frequency and complexity of attacks, featuring new tactics by threat actors. This means that the industrial enterprises, especially critical infrastructures and companies involved in the energy transition — utilities, power generators, renewable energy companies, suppliers and service providers — have an additional responsibility to prepare for and mitigate cybersecurity risks.
Given the critical nature of OT environments and their stability, they will be subject to increasing regulatory requirements. Compliance and cybersecurity awareness are becoming conversations at the board level of industrial companies, and assessing and ranking critical assets against regulatory standards will be of paramount importance to CIOs. They will need tools to break down disparate performance standards and provide the transparency needed to comply with regulations and prevent social and environmental damage caused by compromised security infrastructures.
Considering different length of the IT and OT system lifecycles, sensitivity and safety-relevance of the OT systems and automation tools, the approach to security usually requires a combination of security technologies and services, including:
- OT security audit and governance – aiming at understanding the security risks and requirements for industrial infrastructures, as well as mid- and long-term cybersecurity strategy planning
- OT security solution integration to protect industrial networks, workstations and other assets
- Continuous security monitoring – for better security visibility through the analysis of the security events from multiple sources to spot out even complex cyber-attacks at their early stages
- Security training – aimed at continuous improvement of the cybersecurity skills among OT operators, cybersecurity experts as well as other non-IT teams and executives
