[White Paper] Three Steps to Keep Smart Factory Operations Running

[White Paper] Three Steps to Keep Smart Factory Operations Running | SPONSORED

For factories and manufacturers, the need for cybersecurity is urgent. This is due to the concerns arising from operation stoppages caused by security incidents, resulting in loss of revenue. Unlike enterprise IT, system administrators face several issues within smart factory security, namely difficult to eliminate vulnerabilities, the spread of malware, and flat network configurations. Furthermore, when implementing countermeasures, problems within the operating environment (i.e. prohibited software installation), makes it difficult to resolve these issues.

3 Steps to Secure Smart Factories

Considering these issues and challenges, cyber risk can be minimized through three steps, 1). Prevention, 2). Detection, and 3). Persistence via security design. Especially in smart factories, IT is actively used in OT (industrial control system) environments and network connections are expanding. In such a complicated environment, it is effective to protect with security that combines technology optimized for OT and IT. These approaches should help ensure the continuity of operations in smart factories.

Therefore, this white paper from Trend Micro introduces practical security countermeasures that should be considered at system planning and design phase. In particular, based on the above issues, we propose the following best practices for each environment:

• The existing environment that many companies should work on first
•  Smart factory environments that will be newly constructed in the future

Check our previous article about some interesting smart factory case studies.

By developing such countermeasures, it is possible to efficiently reduce cybersecurity risk and thereby realize continual operations in smart factories. As a result, it will lead to the original goal of the smart factory, which is to improve productivity.

As Cybersecurity risks become an issue in more and more smart factories, causing production stoppage and revenue loss, a security solution which combines IT and OT is needed more than ever. However, it’s not feasible to efficiently and effectively “keep operations running” by just deploying IT-centric security solutions within a factory, deploying detection solution—which just increases operation costs, or by deploying different vendor security solutions.

Sponsored by