Your industrial community will not be a commodity: it’s strategic to your success

Over the previous 20 years, I’ve loved the journey I’ve taken with industrial clients as companions, serving to them modernize and safe their infrastructures. As know-how enters the age of AI and clients prepared themselves for superior know-how, I really feel energized by the chance to assist them meet the challenges they’re dealing with as they appear to digitize and defend their networks at scale.

Our clients really feel an urgency to make sure their networks are securely maintained, and I continuously hear from them that it’s their high concern. Cisco is dedicated to securing clients’ operations, which is why I’m happy to announce that our full Industrial Ethernet portfolio of DIN rail, rackmount, and IP67-rated switches is now each IEC 62443-4-1 and 4-2 licensed.

That is excellent news for purchasers, as a result of it means our IE portfolio meets a strict sequence of internationally acknowledged requirements that particularly deal with the cybersecurity challenges confronted by Industrial Automation and Management Methods (IACS). That is essential for industries like manufacturing, vitality, and transportation. Half 4-1 of the IEC 62443 normal outlines particular necessities for the safe improvement of merchandise that make up an IACS. Which means that corporations who develop the gear should reveal how they meet stringent secure-by-design necessities. Half 4-2 specifies the safety capabilities required for a bit of apparatus to be built-in into an industrial community.

As a producer, the economic community you put money into will form your means to compete and achieve at the moment’s industrial panorama, so if you’re connecting your multi-million-dollar manufacturing machines with out a lot consideration for networking gear, you could be disillusioned when your community suffers a safety breach and allows you to down – and also you expertise a significant disruption in manufacturing.

The selection of commercial networking gear is strategic

Driving long-term effectivity and productiveness requires that you just take into account the continuing impression of the economic switches, routers, and entry factors in your operations and the way they may talk between machines and management methods. Your wants will evolve, so choosing scalable, versatile elements will provide you with room for future development and straightforward integration into your community. And given how susceptible industrial operations have gotten to cyberattacks, selecting gear with sturdy safety features that adjust to strict cybersecurity laws (such because the NIS2 Directive throughout Europe) is integral to defending delicate information and important infrastructure. However how are you going to assess whether or not the gear you’re deploying is safe sufficient to safeguard your operations and compliant with laws?

ISA/IEC 62443 offers a rubric for assessing gear safety

The ISA/IEC 62443 industrial cybersecurity normal defines necessities that industrial elements should meet to be thought of safe. As a result of this normal is a group effort pushed by the Worldwide Society of Automation (ISA) and the Worldwide Electrotechnical Fee (IEC), it’s acknowledged globally as a blueprint for securing industrial infrastructures.

Cisco and ISA/IEC 62443-4 compliance

At Cisco, our networking merchandise observe the strict Cisco Safe Improvement Lifecycle (CSDL) course of, which enforces a secure-by-design philosophy in all levels from product planning, working, monitoring, to end-of-life. The CSDL course of is licensed to adjust to ISA/IEC 62443-4-1 necessities, which implies that all Cisco merchandise are 4-1 compliant. This underscores our dedication to serving to clients construct safe, protected industrial networks.

When Cisco Industrial Ethernet switches are ISA/IEC 62443-4-2 licensed, it implies that their safety in-depth design complies with rigorous necessities. They observe Cisco’s iterative course of to establish and mitigate dangers to make switches as safe as doable. Merely put, our switches meet the strict standards for inclusion in a safe community.

For community patrons, the selection is safe

With all the alternatives within the market for industrial networking gear, patrons might have a tough time evaluating apples to apples. ISA/IEC 62443 is a gold normal metric for comparability. With Cisco’s complete portfolio of commercial switches now licensed for each ISA/IEC 62443-4-1 and 4-2, we’re making it simple so that you can standardize on a single complete household of entry, aggregation, and distribution switches that addresses all of your use instances.

After all, it’s essential be sure that regardless of all of your precautions you don’t inadvertently enable vulnerabilities in your in any other case safe operations when putting in machine builder options. Put down ISA/IEC 62443-4 certification necessities in your RFP, and ensure your machine builder companions use Cisco Industrial Ethernet switches of their options.

Study extra about Cisco Industrial Ethernet switches, Cisco Industrial Menace Protection, and skim why Forrester has named Cisco a pacesetter in OT cybersecurity for 2024, or e-book a free, zero-commitment one-on-one session with a Cisco cybersecurity knowledgeable and get an illustration.

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