Your industrial community shouldn’t be a commodity: it’s strategic to your success

Over the previous 20 years, I’ve loved the journey I’ve taken with industrial prospects as companions, serving to them modernize and safe their infrastructures. As know-how enters the age of AI and prospects 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 prospects really feel an urgency to make sure their networks are securely maintained, and I regularly hear from them that it’s their prime concern. Cisco is dedicated to securing prospects’ 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 handle the cybersecurity challenges confronted by Industrial Automation and Management Programs (IACS). That is crucial for industries like manufacturing, vitality, and transportation. Half 4-1 of the IEC 62443 customary outlines particular necessities for the safe growth of merchandise that make up an IACS. Which means that firms who develop the gear should exhibit how they meet stringent secure-by-design necessities. Half 4-2 specifies the safety capabilities required for a chunk of kit to be built-in into an industrial community.

As a producer, the commercial community you put money into will form your means to compete and achieve at present’s industrial panorama, so if you’re connecting your multi-million-dollar manufacturing machines with out a lot consideration for networking gear, you might 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 business networking gear is strategic

Driving long-term effectivity and productiveness requires that you just think about the continued affect of the commercial switches, routers, and entry factors in your operations and the way they’ll talk between machines and management programs. Your wants will evolve, so deciding on scalable, versatile parts will provide you with room for future development and simple integration into your community. And given how susceptible industrial operations have gotten to cyberattacks, selecting gear with strong security measures that adjust to strict cybersecurity rules (such because the NIS2 Directive throughout Europe) is integral to defending delicate knowledge and significant 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 rules?

ISA/IEC 62443 offers a rubric for assessing gear safety

The ISA/IEC 62443 industrial cybersecurity customary defines necessities that industrial parts should meet to be thought of safe. As a result of this customary is a neighborhood 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 comply with 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 prospects 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 comply with 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 customary metric for comparability. With Cisco’s complete portfolio of business 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.

In fact, you might want to be certain 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.

Be taught extra about Cisco Industrial Ethernet switches, Cisco Industrial Risk 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 professional and get an indication.

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