Efficiency insights
- It is important to integrate cybersecurity with operations in industrial environments to enhance efficiency, boost productivity and protect against cyber threats like ransomware and malware.
- It’s best to find platforms that offer asset discovery, centralized visibility, data-driven decision making, vulnerability management, threat detection and response, compliance and collaboration across teams to improve security and operational efficiency.
Industrial companies face a delicate balancing act between driving operational efficiency and defending against cyberattacks. In nearly every industry segment, leaders are focused on streamlining processes and technologies, connecting more systems than ever before and enabling rapid data sharing across the enterprise. But if you want to leverage the benefits of digitization, you’ll have to take on the risks, too — which are an ever-increasing attack surface and potentially a higher frequency of incidents.
The extent to which you can achieve digital transformation, enhance efficiency, boost productivity and consequently increase revenue is constrained by your capacity to ensure the security of your environment.
Challenges impacting operations and productivity
Dragos works with industrial companies around the world, and these challenges are nearly universal:
- Increased business risk from cybersecurity threats: The rise of cyber threats, including ransomware, malware and targeted attacks, poses significant risks to industrial operations. Protecting sensitive processes, operations data and proprietary IP is paramount.
- Pressure to improve operational efficiency: Operational efficiency is a necessity for survival and growth. The integration of digital technologies, automation, data analytics and real-time monitoring is indispensable to meet these demands.
- Identifying actionable data: Industrial environments generate data at an unprecedented rate, leading to data silos and fragmentation. Ensuring data quality and integrity — and facilitating practical decision making — is a critical challenge.
- Managing compliance and regulations: Achieving compliance while maintaining operational efficiency is an intricate task, and sometimes a moving target. To avoid disruption and downtime, you’ll need a proactive and real-world approach to cybersecurity governance.
Tips for helping industrial companies integrate cybersecurity and operations to improve security and productivity
Company should find an operational technology (OT) cybersecurity technology platform that incorporates a holistic approach to address these challenges:
- Comprehensive asset discovery: The platform identifies and catalogs all assets within the industrial network, enabling proactive maintenance and reducing downtime.
- Centralized visibility: The platform offers centralized visibility, allowing different departments to understand the overall operational landscape and identify anomalies that may affect productivity.
- Data-driven decision making: The platform collects data from various sources within industrial networks, ensuring holistic analysis and supporting risk assessments.
- Vulnerability management: It continuously monitors the environment for vulnerabilities and potential threats, correcting and prioritizing guidance so you can remediate what actually matters. Cross-functional insights can help decision-makers understand the potential impact of threats on operations, so you can prioritize and allocate mitigation resources effectively.
- Compliance and reporting: The platform helps industrial companies meet regulatory requirements with detailed reporting and compliance tools.
- Collaboration across teams: Using a common interface and data repository, different departments can collaborate more effectively, enhancing the overall security and efficiency of processes.
Original content can be found at Dragos.
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