Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12 to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn more
The world’s leading companies in healthcare, utilities, pharmaceutical manufacturing and energy (including nuclear) rely on Inductive Automations Inflammation platform to power, protect and maintain the health and well-being of the millions of people they serve. Getting cybersecurity and endpoint security in order is an important part of their core business.
These companies must take bold steps to harden endpoints before the next generation of AI-driven threats escalate. This trend has become apparent as software vendors to manufacturers, utilities, and critical infrastructure have reviewed their endpoint strategies to overcome resource bottlenecks. unprecedented attacks on the manufacturing industry.
Customers in more than 90 countries integrate their operational technology (OT) and IT systems with real-time sensor data using Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform to accurately measure the pulse of their business. Keeping the source code of the Ignition platform, DevOps and SDLC processes secure is a high priority.
Jason Waits, CISO at Inductive Automation, told VentureBeat, “As the business continues to scale, our attack surface naturally scales with it. This growth and increasing customer base in critical industries worldwide demand increased investments in cybersecurity. The shift to remote work also requires a strong focus on identity and endpoint security.
“We recognize the critical place of our software in the supply chain,” he added, “and it is my mission to build a world-class cybersecurity program.”
Inductive Automation customers tell VentureBeat that the Ignition platform is a critical part of their IoT and IIoT infrastructure. They say it helps them quickly deploy new applications in products. Infrastructure providers, including utilities, oil and gas producers, and process manufacturers supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software to gain the visibility and control they need to keep operations on track, often by integrating their existing industrial control systems (ICS) with the Ignition platform.
Gartner offers equal insights in the company’s Ignition platform and SCADA solution.
Defending global infrastructure when manufacturing is under siege
Manufacturing is the industry most attacked because attackers know that if they can disrupt these companies’ supply chains, operations and customer deliveries, they can demand ransoms well above the industry average. IBM Security’s 2023 Xpower Threat Intelligence index found that manufacturing accounted for 61% of intrusion attempts primarily targeting OT systems and 23% of all ransomware attacks. Industry was the victim in 58% of the incidents X-Force helped resolve.
Backdoor attacks targeting manufacturers’ ICS and SCADA systems are common because they are among the most unprotected manufacturer’s OT assets. Last year the Cyber security and infrastructure security Desk (CISA) warned that Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) are criminal gangs targeting many of the most popular ICS and SCADA devices.
Inductive Automation anticipated the increasing severity of cybersecurity risks in manufacturing and has hardened its platform with each release. Security is part of the company’s development DNA and replacing 500 endpoints was necessary to keep the DevOps, engineering and SDLC processes secure.
The importance of security to the company is evident in customer support. Are Inflammation Security Hardening guide And Security Best practices for your Inflammation System articles and accompanying guidelines on how to define security levels in the application they all reflect how ingrained cybersecurity is in the design of the platform. The company supplies one Certainly portal accessible to all customers with the current state of access control, application security, endpoint security, network security, access control and several other factors.
How inductive automation turned endpoints from a challenge into a strength
“We see ourselves as a critical part of the supply chain for customers in the world’s most critical industries,” said Waits. “So we need to invest, and invest early, to make sure we’re never the source of a security issue.”
Inductive Automation’s security infrastructure is state of the art. Yet an outdated package protecting the company’s endpoints – a combination of products purchased by the parent company – slowed down IT systems. And keeping the legacy endpoint security platform up-to-date took an inordinate amount of time with patches and updates.
Endpoints became a bottleneck in processing power
Outdated endpoint security software drained the company’s processing power when it was needed most to stay on track with new releases critical to the company’s growth. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Waits said, “Our previous solution was resource intensive and prone to false positives. The agent also became unstable over time. This resulted in a lot of wasted time writing exclusions, reinstalling agents or otherwise trying to keep the service running without incurring the wrath of our users.”
Developing SCADA applications and their supporting platform requires a lot of computing power. Members of the DevOps teams complained that the systems they developed code on were slow and that something needed to be done. The endpoint security software also started producing an exceptionally high number of false positives, resulting in wasted time and effort for the security team.
To support the company’s continued growth and ever-changing business model, each security solution needed to be flexible, adaptable, and scalable.
The stronger the endpoint, the more strategic it becomes
Inductive Automation’s achievements in replacing the old endpoint security system, which consumed valuable processing power and compromised release dates, reflect a core principle about endpoint security. This principle is that the stronger the endpoint, the more strategic value it provides.
Starting with the key criteria of having an endpoint solution with minimal CPU demand and negligible impact on system performance, Waits and his team evaluated a range of endpoint security system vendors, all leaders in the market.
“After a proof-of-concept, CrowdStrike proved lightweight yet effective at stopping the tests we put on it,” said Waits. “We stress tested the agent to the best of our ability and were unable to create a scenario where the use of resources on the machines was hindered. Many of the other security tools we use had integrations with CrowdStrike, which allowed us to take advantage of some synergy within our stack.”
Waits and his team decided to run a real-world scenario and have one of the more outspoken developers participate in a beta test. Waits noted with amusement that the engineer quickly forgot that the endpoint solution under test was even running. (The solution turned out to be CrowdStrike’s Falcon Insight XDR.)
Consolidate endpoints to reduce costs and increase visibility
Waits told VentureBeat that the company needed to find an endpoint solution that would eliminate the processing power bottleneck while providing higher fidelity of detection and accuracy. Basically, the team wanted to consolidate features and reduce costs and power consumption, while reducing the number of false positives the previous endpoint system produced.
“One of our main goals was to consolidate vulnerability scanning and endpoint firewall management into a single endpoint agent, removing two separate security tools. Reducing the number of agents we have to install and maintain significantly reduces IT management overheads and improves security,” he told VentureBeat. “We also used other modules such as USB Control, Identity Protection and Attack Surface Management to further consolidate our security infrastructure while improving detection accuracy.
“There is a very measurable operational cost of individually choosing and managing every single part of an endpoint solution,” he added, “but when you consolidate on a single platform, you reduce overhead.”
In short, an endpoint security solution needs detection accuracy, performance, and consolidation to save costs
“We’re not wasting our time chasing red herrings (or false positives), and we’re achieving greater consolidation by having a single agent handle multiple tasks,” said Waits. Inductive Automation finds that aggressively consolidating previously separate functionality into a single endpoint also helps to better protect all customer-facing functions, including product activation, ticketing, and licensing.
He explained how Inductive Automation provides all customer-facing services beyond web applications and network firewalls. “We have a very aggressive identity protection strategy, using heavy hardware-assisted MFA and strict role-based access control (RBAC). Administrative access is short-lived and authorized by MFA on dedicated workstations with privileged access.” And finally, “We undergo annual third-party penetration testing to validate the controls we have implemented.”