Reducing the cybersecurity burden of OT in highly regulated industries.
As cyberthreats continue to plague government and industry, attention is turning to our nation’s most highly regulated industries. Regulations in these industries cover many aspects, but increasing pressure is being placed on securing operational technology (OT). While information technology (IT) controls an organization’s data, OT monitors and controls an organization’s operational equipment and assets.
IT and OT have been separate in the past, and their technology has been air-gapped to reduce vulnerabilities with the OT systems. But as technology advances, a convergence of the two is forming. And this puts OT (and its vulnerable legacy software) at greater risk, especially in highly regulated industries that depend on their OT to provide critical service.
The nuclear industry is the most highly regulated industry in the world. In addition, other highly regulated industry in the United States are healthcare, insurance, pharmaceutical, energy, telecommunications, and banking. These highly regulated industries face a framework of rules and regulations at the federal, state, and sometimes even local level.
According to IBM, “Highly regulated industries are feeling pressure to transform, but they cannot afford to drop the ball on security, resiliency, and compliance.” With ever-present pressure to increase security, the time has come to treat OT with the same watchful eye as IT.
The convergence of IT and OT can strengthen your security posture.
IT and OT have been operating separately for decades and are often physically isolated. When these two independent systems are interlaced the combination of OT and IT provides a more secure infrastructure to benefit industries from manufacturing to energy. IT/OT integration can help solve every day challenges, such as distributed asset management, an aging workforce and evolving customer expectations.
OT and IT network infrastructure have similar elements, like switches, routers, and wireless technology. Therefore, OT networks can benefit from the rigor and experience that IT has built over the years with standard network management and security controls to build a solid network foundation.
For example, OT often uses spreadsheets to manage compliance data, which is ineffective in highly regulated industries. Spreadsheets lack the capabilities to keep up with regulatory changes, putting companies at risk for non-compliance. They’re not designed to handle high volumes of data. Integrating IT and OT can streamline processes and utilize the same approaches for securing and documenting compliance data.
Repeatable processes can help you respond quickly to evolving threats.
Almost every cybersecurity professional knows that a data breach is now a matter of “when” rather than “if.” Nothing can be fully secured, and the more complex your stack is, the more likely malicious actors will find a way to get north of the wall. To establish a cyber-resilient security posture, you need to focus on having repeatable, proven processes to find the vulnerabilities and act before something goes terribly wrong, which it most likely will at some point.
Organizations in the defense industrial base and highly regulated industries often find it overwhelming to harden their systems against attack. In addition, many small and mid-sized businesses store, process, transmit or collect Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), and this complicates cybersecurity approaches because the processes for securing systems are highly mandated. As a result, automation is often used to meet government mandates, simplify the process, use well-proven tools, and ease the burden of compliance.
Getting by with a little help from your friends.
Vendors can be your best friends by helping you merge your IT and OT systems or secure systems against cyberattacks. Your vendors can help you by:
- Outsourcing to bring in strategic skills and knowledge
- Reducing costs by doing the same work you’d hire new team members to do, but at a lower rate
- Simplifying and accelerating your risk assessment preparedness
- Putting industry standards in place to ease compliance
- Finding the gaps in your security so you can fill them
- Removing burdensome human effort through automation
- Delivering greater agility at a lower risk
- Establishing a Zero Trust stance and rapidly validating and verifying everything inside and outside your network
Integrating IT and OT for a coordinated security stance.
As technology improves and cybercriminals perfect their techniques, it just makes sense to deploy a holistic approach where a coordinated effort manages OT and IT. See how automation can tilt the battle in you and bring these opposites together by automating your security efforts with SteelCloud.
SteelCloud is a leading STIG and CIS compliance automation software developer, and our ConfigOS technology is being widely deployed to secure Operational Technology (OT) assets. In fact, SteelCloud’s patented ConfigOS is the only proven automation solution for scanning and auditing CIS benchmarks according to PCN/OT, PCS, ICS, SCADA, cloud and compliance requirements. Schedule a demo today.
