Despite ongoing news of breaches and cyber-attacks—or perhaps because of them—many end users are becoming more forward-thinking about cybersecurity issues—usually because they want to get plant-floor data to cloud-computing services and enterprise levels, and push instructions back to operations.
For instance, to comply with the European Union’s Network and Information Security (NIS) directive and get abnormal traffic alerts, BW Offshore recently implemented Claroty’s Continuous Threat Detection (CTD) software on its BW Catcher floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel deployed 100 kilometer east of Aberdeen in the North Sea. CTS gives BW Catcher continuous, live, remote visibility, security and control in one place; provides alerts about abnormal activity in its OT environment; delivers automatic and timely updates on new vulnerabilities and risks; and establishes a baseline for OT traffic to highlight any deviations that could represent a potential issue. This visibility lets BW Offshore hold its OT suppliers accountable for timely mitigation of risks.
“It brings value to us to see where we’re exposed,” says Enrico Piccini, discipline manager for instruments and telecommunications at BW Offshore. “We’re getting information on activities we’d never be able to detect previously, even by the people offshore.”
Protections enable recovery
Similarly, as part of a project to replace its manual backup and file saving procedure, India-based Tata Steel recently adopted Acronis’ flexible Cyber Protect software because it combines data protection and cybersecurity. Its single portal lets Tata’s users manage and back up individual files or safeguard their entire workload by backing up the whole system as a single image, ensuring flexible-restore from a centralized management console. Acronis also operates a data center in India that complied with all local, data-residency regulations and had necessary cybersecurity certifications.
Previously, because its users didn’t perform regularly scheduled backups, its recovery point objective (RPO) averaged seven days, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, its recovery time objective (RTO) was five days. Overall, adding Cyber Protect increased Tata’s protected workloads by 50 times to more than 500 per day. Implementing it also improved Tata’s RTO to four to six hours, and reduced its RPO to one day or less.
“Acronis also addressed our most popular use case when a user accidentally deleted some data. Plus, it helps us administrate Microsoft 365 by archiving data from employees who have left the company,” says Rajesh Kumar, CIO at Tata Steel. “With Acronis, we control important data and are no longer dependent on users. By storing it in a certified and secure data center in India, we’re confident that the data will not be lost in any situation.”
