2023 Industrial Cybersecurity Progress Report

Industrial cybersecurity has become "Job One" for manufacturers to enable secure use of modern IT technologies in industrial networks, and seamless communications between IT, OT and cloud resources that require highly granular security policies based on identity and context for people, devices, and applications.

INDUSTRIAL CYBERSECURITY HAS BECOME AN overarching, top priority for manufacturing as the move to the Industrial Internet of Things and cloud computing has created an environment where the traditional air-gap approach to security is not sufficient.

In this special report, the Industrial Ethernet Book reached out to industry experts to gain their insights into the megatrends driving Industrial Cybersecurity technology, industry standards and the challenges facing automation engineers.

Driving the need for distributed security architectures and no single points of control.

According to Andrew McPhee, Solution Architect - Industrial security at Cisco, key technology trends and growth of the IIoT are creating a need for new industrial cybersecurity solutions.

“The growing adoption of cloud services for running operational processes is driving the need for distributed security architectures and no single points of control. The traditional air-gap approach to industrial security, enforced by firewalls in the industrial DMZ is still needed but not sufficient,” McPhee told the Industrial Ethernet Book recently.

“Enabling secure use of modern IT technologies in industrial networks, and seamless communications between IT, OT, and cloud resources require highly granular security policies based on identity and context, for people, devices, and applications,” he said. “This means being able to identify and profile every connected device, as well as local and remote users, and define least privilege access policies for each one of them.”

McPhee added that, fortunately, the latest advances in edge computing enables industrial networking equipment to embed software capabilities making automated asset discovery, software-based network segmentation, or zero-trust network access (ZTNA) simple to deploy at scale without the need for dedicated security appliances or additional network resources which would typically raise the cost and complexity of such cybersecurity architectures to unbearable levels.

McPhee added that most industrial organizations do not have comprehensive or up-to-date inventory of connected OT assets. You can’t secure or monitor what you don’t know. Modern network equipment such as Cisco industrial networking products automatically build and maintain the inventory at scale without any addition to the industrial network. It makes it easier to have the visibility required to build security policies, monitor assets and communications, comply with cybersecurity regulations, and meet cyber-insurance requirements. It is the foundation to a robust OT cybersecurity strategy.

“With comprehensive visibility, you can restrict communications between assets by using software solutions creating security policies to segment the industrial network into smaller zones of trust as recommended by the ISA/IEC62443 security standard. Cisco industrial networking equipment can enforce these policies to prevent unauthorized communications or avoid attacks to spread. This means there is no need to deploy firewalls