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Three Steps to a Secure Digital Transformation

Embrace Digitization While Mitigating Cybersecurity Risks

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Blog | Cybersecurity
Recent ActivityRecent Activity
Three Steps to a Secure Digital Transformation
Embrace Digitization While Mitigating Cybersecurity Risks

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For most organizations, digital transformation is an essential evolution for preserving relevancy and competitiveness. It unlocks opportunities to gather new information and reveals insights that can quickly improve decision-making and operational efficiency, benefitting both growth and profitability.

In the Operational Technology (OT) space, digital transformation can help improve key metrics, such as increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), improving production quality and quantity, and boosting performance and operational availability. 

Global spending on digital transformation is expected to reach $6.8 trillion by 2023, according to IDC estimates. Yet digital transformation often translates to new risks, especially in OT where cybersecurity maturity typically lags that of IT.

What’s the nature of these digital transformation security risks?

  • Connectivity is expanding the organization’s attack surface. OT systems are connecting to networks they never were before, extracting and transmitting data for analysis by multiple systems, such as ERP systems, residing on IT networks. Once IT and OT networks are bridged, pathways for cybercriminals to breach OT can be increased exponentially if countermeasures are not taken.

  • New applications are being used to harness data and insights. Software applications are also being deployed in OT network environments to analyze operational data, essentially at the edge of the network. Many applications are cloud-based, increasing agility but exposing OT infrastructure to the internet and to supply chain risks.

Given the digital transformation security challenges in OT, it’s not surprising that industrial organizations transform more slowly than IT-centric industries. Yet the benefits are undeniable. For example, end-to-end connectivity enables supply chain track-and-trace, to manage quality more effectively and to address quality issues or recalls—helping protect your customers and your brand.​

Where to begin

It’s best to start your digital transformation journey by building proper security in from the start. What if you’re already moving forward and must enhance security approaches and architectures that are in motion?

Wherever you start, these steps can help close the doors to OT breaches while leaving open a path to digital transformation: speed and automation: implementing a Zero Trust strategy, segmenting and hardening networks, and deploying continuous monitoring.

Step 1: Implement a Zero Trust strategy

Implementing Zero Trust helps reduce and mitigate successful cyberattacks. This is paramount when harnessing new technologies that leverage the benefits of digital data flow.

Zero Trust involves several key principles:

  • Identifying and prioritizing business critical assets
  • Defining protect surfaces (these are made up of DaaS elements, which are data, applications, assets, and services)
  • Mapping transaction flows
  • Designing an appropriate architecture, which may include micro-segmentation to separate the DaaS elements, enhanced identify and access management technology and policies related to the expected behavior of the data and the user or applications, as well as firewalls
  • Continuous monitoring

In this way, a Zero Trust strategy can support the mechanics of digital transformation, such as securely adding new user populations, customer engagement models, and new automation technology including Internet of Things (IoT) and OT devices and sensors. Therefore it’s an excellent strategy for digital transformation security in industrial environments.

Step 2: Segment and harden networks

Network segmentation safeguards business critical assets by separating them from non-critical assets. Hardening security around them then helps to ensure that breaches in one part of the network do not go on to infect others.

A key network segmentation strategy is the Industrial Demilitarized Zone (IDMZ) - a boundary or ‘air gap’ that separates IT networks from OT environments. The IDMZ manages the separation of business systems from direct access to OT environments, helping protect industrial control systems in the event of an IT breach.

The air gap techniques and technologies that most industrial security standards rely on tend to run counter to effective digital transformation strategies. Security teams must decide how to map their Zero Trust approach to the right industrial security standard (ISA 62443, for example), to achieve compliance requirements while protecting OT environments from fast growing and continuously evolving threats.

Please contact Rockwell Automation for guidance in mapping industrial security standards to your Zero Trust strategy.

Step 3: Deploy continuous monitoring

Digital environments are subject to increasing cybersecurity threats. Enterprises must monitor continuously to be aware of what’s occurring within their environments, either through in-house analysts or a third-party security operations center (SOC).

Threat detection software enables effective 24/7 network monitoring. Anomalous behaviors are identified quickly and can be addressed before malware has a chance to spread within the infrastructure. Threat detection software also automates asset inventories, allowing this critical security step to occur at high frequency – hourly or daily, for example, to show security teams any unauthorized devices or users on the network.

Continuous monitoring is further accomplished by reviewing internal and external logs, such as those generated by a Security Events and Information Management (SEIM) platform. Digital transformation security risks can then be further reduced as learnings from each attempted attack are applied to the organization’s cybersecurity plan.

Start your secure Digital Transformation journey today

Rockwell Automation offers solutions and expertise for a secure Digital Transformation, built on deep experience in both industrial automation and industrial cybersecurity. Download our latest guide for more information: The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Secure Digital Transformation in OT.

Or contact Rockwell Automation today to speak to an expert about secure Digital Transformation.

Speak to a Cybersecurity Expert

Originally published in Brilliance Security Magazine.

Published September 26, 2022

Industrial zone,The equipment of oil refining,Close-up of industrial pipelines of an oil-refinery plant,Detail of oil pipeline with valves in large oil refinery.
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Tags: Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation

Brian Deken
Brian Deken
Business Development Manager, NA Connected Services, Rockwell Automation
Brian Deken is the NA Commercial Manager for Connected Services. He has been working in the Automation Industry for over 20 years with various roles involving Services, Sales and Management. Brian is responsible for managing and driving a holistic approach that is based in 62443 and NIST standards.
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