How do you balance production efficiency and cybersecurity risks?

1 Production network vulnerabilities

A production network is a system of devices, machines, sensors, controllers, and computers that communicate to facilitate production tasks. These networks can be isolated or connected to other networks, such as enterprise or cloud networks. Unfortunately, production networks are vulnerable to cyberattacks that can disrupt, damage, or manipulate processes, equipment, or data. Common threats include denial-of-service attacks that overload or block network traffic, malware infections that compromise devices or data, unauthorized access or tampering with network settings, and data breaches or leaks that expose sensitive information.

2 Production network security goals

To protect your production network from cyberattacks, it is essential to define your security goals and requirements. These may vary depending on the industry, regulations, standards, and business objectives. Common security goals include confidentiality, ensuring only authorized parties can access or view production data; integrity, ensuring production data is accurate and reliable; availability, ensuring the network and devices are functional and accessible; and accountability, tracking and auditing production network activities and events.

3 Production network security challenges

Achieving your production network security goals can be difficult due to the complexity of the network, which often involves a large number of devices, machines, protocols, and interfaces with varying security features and vulnerabilities. Additionally, legacy systems may include outdated or unsupported devices, machines, or software that are hard to patch, update, or replace. Moreover, production networks may need to connect with other networks that have different security policies and standards. On top of that, production networks must maintain a high level of performance, reliability, and productivity while implementing security measures and controls.

4 Production network security best practices

To balance production efficiency and cybersecurity risks, you need to follow best practices for securing your production network. This includes inventorying all devices, machines, software and data, segmenting the network into zones or subnets and applying appropriate security policies, using encryption to protect data in transit and at rest, monitoring for abnormal or suspicious activities, keeping devices, machines and software updated with the latest patches or versions, and training staff and users on security policies. These steps will help to ensure the security of your production network.

5 Production network security solutions

To ensure the best security practices, you need to utilize various production network security solutions. Firewalls can filter out malicious network traffic based on predetermined rules. Virtual private networks (VPNs) create secure tunnels between your production network and other networks. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) monitor and analyze network traffic for any potential or actual attacks. Antivirus software scans and removes malware from devices, machines, or data. Security information and event management systems (SIEM) collect data from sources such as firewalls and IDS/IPS to provide real-time or historical insights and reports on your production network security status and incidents.