Converged Platform to Secure IT & OT Systems

A company from the food and beverage industry, located in Europe and North America with more than 4,000 collaborators and 15 production sites, turned to CyberElements to centralise, within one infrastructure, secure internal and external access to IT and OT while guaranteeing the separation of IT and OT.

The company works with multiple industrial suppliers and did not have the necessary infrastructure or licences to provide remote access to these suppliers or their service providers. Remote access was complicated to manage, and security was difficult to ensure.

Challenges

• Centralise remote access from the service provider’s network or admins’ houses to the industrial control systems under the organisation’s control.
• Implement Zero Trust principles.
• Centralise and trace access to target infrastructures according to the possibilities offered by manufacturers and industrial protocols: access to control applications on an engineering station, access to equipment from the engineering station running on the service provider’s or manufacturer’s workstation.
• Set up fully isolated control zones for IT and OT.

Solution Highlights

Control and traceability of all access

With CyberElements, the company benefits from control over all accounts, with complete visibility over actual authorisations on target IT and OT resources. CyberElements makes it possible at any time to trace who did what, when and on which system, guaranteeing the accountability of all accesses to the industrial infrastructure.

The implementation of Zero Trust principles

CyberElements enables companies to implement Zero Trust principles for their industrial infrastructure:

• Application of the principle of least privilege.
• Control of the user’s access context (conformity of the access workstation, authorised access time, and so on).
• Implementation of strong authentication methods (MFA).

Centralise access to IT and OT systems, while guaranteeing a full separation between the two

CyberElements enables secure internal and external access to IT and OT systems to be centralised on a single infrastructure, while guaranteeing the separation between IT and OT: operational teams can thus deploy their administration tools (supervision, patch management, and so on) on production networks.