Manufacturing creates hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide and serves as a key driver for growth, innovation, and technological advancement. It also plays a major role in global trade and competitiveness, making it one of the most important sectors in the economy.
The network is essential for keeping manufacturers operational, so it must be resilient. However, operational technology (OT) networks are incredibly complex, consisting of industrial control systems and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices that are connected to IT networks and out to the Internet. While there’s great value in network connectivity, it also introduces risk.
A recent study found that 68 percent of senior manufacturing decision makers believe their IT teams are understaffed or lack the necessary training to manage increasing network complexities. Uptime is at risk due to the complexity and limited visibility when managing different devices using different tools across diverse environments with limited time and resources. Additionally, 50 percent of manufacturing leaders say that simplifying network management and controlling costs are top priorities, particularly as they expand into cloud and multi-cloud environments.
Network engineers are experts in a particular set of infrastructure. They shouldn’t have to be coding experts to manage that infrastructure. The tool they use should provide them with a real-time understanding of their multi-vendor environment, allowing them to lay the groundwork for a more resilient network.
The following are some initial areas to prioritize to keep systems up and running when connectivity and management complexity leave them prone to issues.
- Device Discovery: Nearly two-thirds of manufacturing leaders believe that real-time network visibility is crucial to maintaining security and operational efficiency in a global manufacturing environment. New guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) emphasizes the importance of creating an accurate asset inventory and recommends it as a key first step to reducing risk and strengthening operational resilience.
- Knowing what you have, whether it’s connected to the internet, and how it is behaving, is important to help you prevent or rapidly recover from catastrophic failures. However, creating an accurate inventory is also difficult when you have a diverse range of device types and vendors. Being able to pull device information in real-time means you’re never surprised by a rogue device that may be capable of causing disruptions.
- Backup and Restore: When systems are taken down, whether by ransomware or a natural disaster, your ability to recover fast is your top priority. If you don’t have a reliable backup, you can’t recover quickly and ensure system uptime. But that’s particularly difficult to do when you have to back up different types of devices from different vendors. Only 20 percent of network engineers say they can restore from backup within a few minutes. Relying on manual processes to create and execute scripts for network backup and restoration is slow, disruptive, and error-prone.
- Now’s the time to reassess your methods and look for ways to safely streamline this basic, repetitive task. By having a clear and complete list of everything being backed up, you can automate and validate backups, as well as initiate restores with a single click when systems go down. You can also establish a backup schedule that is optimized based on the criticality of data and systems, ensuring you’re always covered.
- Configuration Management: Recent breaches and business outages have prompted the development of new regulations and internal policies to guide cyber resilience efforts. According to Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis, approximately 45 percent of major network-related outages are caused by configuration management failures. Tracking and auditing network device configuration and inventory changes can be challenging.
- However, you can run automated checks to identify drift and automatically groom devices back into compliance, or choose to do so manually. Even multi-step updates can be automated if an update needs to be applied across multiple software versions.
- Lifecycle Management: From onboarding to end-of-life, cyber resilience means your network infrastructure is always in a known and trusted state. Legacy OT assets can have life spans of decades. In contrast, modern internet-connected devices change much more frequently, so 68 percent of enterprises upgrade these devices every quarter.
Optimizing the lifespan of network and IoT devices by tracking end-of-life information for hardware, software, and specific components enables organizations to manage device lifecycles efficiently. It’s also essential for maintaining network reliability. Having real-time information in a single location allows teams to proactively plan for upgrades and replacements and budget more effectively.
The Cumulative Value of Starting with the Basics
While each of these areas independently contributes to building a more resilient network infrastructure, the benefits are also cumulative.
- Knowing what devices you have in real time lays the foundation for automating backup and restore and avoids costly downtime in the event of a disruption.
- Having detailed knowledge of network infrastructure helps teams quickly identify which devices are configured properly. Additionally, if a configuration upgrade unintentionally causes an issue, having a recent, validated backup enables teams to quickly restore to the previous state.
- Centralized device management and unified network visibility enable teams to understand the lifecycles of their different devices and their status, proactively maintain device reliability, and determine what to replace and when.
Automating the basics establishes a continuous cycle of cyber resilience, laying the foundation for further strengthening security and compliance. Given manufacturing’s vital role in the global economy and rising concerns about risk, the time to build more cyber resilient networks is now.
