FeatureCyberattacks on critical infrastructure seem to make the news every week. It is a concerning trend that Nozomi Networks has seen in the field. Nozomi’s recent threat report found cyberthreats to industrial and critical infrastructure have indeed reached new heights as threat actors double down on high value targets.
With industrial organisations ramping connectivity to accelerate digital transformation and remote work, threat actors are weaponising the software supply chain and ransomware attacks are growing in number, sophistication, and persistence. Understanding the effectiveness of defences against the emerging threat and vulnerability landscape plays an important role in a strong cybersecurity programme.
Security professionals should be considering Zero Trust strategies to mitigate risk.
Nozomi Networks is valued for superior operational visibility, advanced OT and IoT threat detection and strength across deployments. Nozomi Networks’ solutions support more than 44 million devices in thousands of installations across energy, manufacturing, mining, transportation, utilities, building automation, smart cities and critical infrastructure.
Nozomi’s products are deployable onsite and in the cloud. They span IT, OT and IoT to automate the hard work of inventorying, visualising, and monitoring industrial control networks through the innovative use of artificial intelligence. Use cases stretch beyond cybersecurity, and include trouble shooting, asset management and predictive maintenance.
When it comes to securing critical and industrial infrastructure, especially in a new world of hybrid work models and accelerated transformation, managing the risk of malicious cyber activity such as ransomware is not just about security defences around the network. It is about figuring out how you can limit the impact or operate despite an attack. That is why building in resilience is equally important.
Security professionals should be considering Zero Trust strategies to mitigate risk in hybrid IT, IoT, OT, cloud environments. Starting from a never trust, always verify mindset will limit the impact of breaches wherever they occur.
Understanding and managing the convergence of IT and OT is a critical area.
Nozomi Networks’ Guardian sensors were launched in 2016 to protect complex OT and IoT networks. Guardian consolidates asset discovery and network visualisation, vulnerability assessment, risk monitoring and anomaly and threat detection. Guardian protects mixed OT, IoT, and IT networks.
Customers can enhance their implementations via subscriptions for Threat and Asset intelligence, and add-ons providing functionality for smart polling and remote data collection. In addition, Central Management Console and Vantage are designed to unify network visibility and security across IT, OT and IoT assets from anywhere in the world. The Vantage platform is SaaS-based and delivers cloud-based management and analysis of all data from networks protected by Guardian.
Understanding and managing the convergence of IT and OT is a critical area.
5G is one upcoming technology to watch. 5G will accelerate digital transformation. 5G will give businesses constant access to faster, more reliable internet connectivity, a much-needed tool to effectively support remote work scenarios. It also opens the door to massive interconnectivity.
Millions of devices, networks and data transfers supporting process flows and transactions. While this mass-scale connectivity will drive greater business efficiency, it also increases cyber risk and the potential for more significant breaches. Security strategies must evolve to meet the challenge. Solutions must scale and deploy quickly and endlessly as devices are added and support centralised management and monitoring.
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Recommendation for CISOs
• Understanding and managing the convergence of IT and OT is a critical area for decision makers to skill themselves in.
• Organisations are no longer siloed and delivering on this converged strategy is what will differentiate decision makers and organisations.
• As IT and OT worlds rapidly converge, there is no better time for security decision makers to seize the opportunity to support their organisation’s efforts to improve operational resilience by adopting integrated security strategies across IT and OT.
• Gaining a better understanding of OT systems and gaining specialised skills to better assess and support the unique requirements of industrial networks help strengthen security and resilience across IT, OT and IoT networks.
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Organisations are no longer siloed and delivering on converged IT and OT strategy is what will differentiate decision makers and organisations.
