With industrial organizations deploying IoT technologies and connecting their industrial assets to more applications, cybersecurity has become a top priority to capture the benefits of all these digitization efforts. Being the leader in both the cybersecurity and industrial networking markets, Cisco is making heavy investments to bridge the two and enable secure Industry 4.0 deployments.
We are very happy to share with you that Cisco just received Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award for industrial control systems cybersecurity. Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices Awards recognize companies that have identified emerging trends before they became a marketplace standard and have created advanced technologies that will catalyze and transform industries in the near future.
Protecting industrial operations is a very specific challenge. Industrial processes cannot be stopped, and disruption can lead to dramatic human or environmental hazards. Cyberattacks are particularly difficult to detect as they can look like legitimate instructions to assets. Industrial automation technologies can be quite old and have not been designed with security in mind. They generally use specific communication protocols that IT security tools do not understand. In fact, many organizations don’t even have an accurate inventory of industrial assets installed in their networks.
IoT/OT security projects require visibility into industrial assets, their communications, and the industrial processes they support. Gaining this visibility is key to implement security best practices such as network segmentation, but also to detect malicious traffic and process anomalies that could be early sign of a custom attack. With all this information, security analysts have insights and context to build and enforce security policies as well as to investigate and remediate threats.
The combination of Cisco Cyber Vision and Cisco industrial network equipment helps our customers gain this visibility and detect threats at scale throughout their industrial operations. Fully integrated with Cisco SecureX and the entire suite of Cisco security solutions, Frost & Sullivan is recognizing our efforts to bridge the gap between OT and IT so that our customers can build a unified IT/OT threat management strategy.
For industrial organizations to drive their IoT projects to success, Cisco also offers a step-by-step approach that helps kick start their IoT security projects by leveraging OT/IT security consulting services from Cisco CX as well as architecture guidelines and deployment methodologies with our Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs).
Samir Sakpal, Director of Consulting, ICT – Americas, Growth Consulting for Frost & Sullivan explains, “Cisco is uniquely positioned to excel in industrial IoT security. Combining Cyber Vision with Cisco’s wide range of industrial network equipment, cybersecurity tools and OT security services offers unmatched value.”
For more on Cisco’s Global Leadership Award, read the full Frost & Sullivan report here.
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