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Key Takeaways
- Vulnerabilities in connected products can lead to physical damage, not just data breaches. Security must be built into products from the start.
- Connected devices must process and store as little data as necessary to perform their most important functions. This ensures that your business and your customers’ data are protected.
- Attacks and accidents will happen despite your best efforts, so you need to have a strategy to help you recover from a disaster.
When it comes to creating connected products, conversations about safety and security features have changed. Your ability to control threats is no longer dependent on the corporate firewall. Everything is vulnerable to some degree, from your smart devices to on-road vehicles and industrial machinery. The lines between data security and physical security are also now blurrier than ever before.
We live in an era of convergence. Traditionally, IT security systems focused on protecting data centers and corporate networks. Operational technology (OT) is different because it works in the industrial IoT (IIoT) landscape and interacts with the physical world, including machines, the environment and industry. When these two areas are combined, there is a more complex opportunity for attacks and the digital vulnerabilities can be catastrophic if not managed properly.
In other words, vulnerability exposure no longer comes down to leaked data. There is a possibility of physical damage from damage to systems, cars and pharmaceutical equipment.
Related: Your company’s security strategy has a glaring hole. Here’s what causes it and how to fix it.
Strategic phase 1: Securing the product lifestyle (from design to decommissioning)
Security is no longer something that is just optional. It’s something you clearly need for the long-term and short-term survival of your business. Security by design is something that is becoming particularly important these days. It involves moving security testing to the left as you complete your development pipelines.
Your goal should always be to remove any vulnerabilities before a single prototype is built. This will be much better and more beneficial than discovering an issue during the final pre-production penetration test.
You should always strive to thoroughly audit all weak links in the supply chain. All aftermarket parts, including chipsets, sensor modules and open source OS layers, can introduce their own weaknesses. For this reason, a very thorough post-launch audit process is necessary, including creating a software bill of materials (SBOM) and verifying that component security standards are met.
Related: How Smart Technology Is About to Endanger Your Business Security?
Strategic phase 2: Data governance at the edge
We live in a world where there are connected and interconnected product systems. As a result, maintaining close control over your cloud gateway cannot always guarantee that data is well managed and secure. Companies should always strive to implement control at the device level or at the edge.
Intelligence must be collected and researched locally through what is called a decentralized data strategy. This saves time and bandwidth and ensures that the sensitive data being processed can be processed as efficiently as possible.
Today, life as a digital minimalist is less stressful and much easier. Devices should always be intended to store and process as little data as necessary to perform their main functions. Digital minimalism ensures that your customers’ data is always protected, and it protects your business too. Employees will find it much easier to maintain critical systems, and key stakeholders and customers will be impressed with the way you run your operations.
Proper authorization is an important part of edge governance. Always try to ensure that machine-to-machine identity management is used. This allows all devices and gateways to have a strong identity. This allows you to protect yourself and ensure that any device that is lost, stolen or compromised can be quickly removed from the network without losing critical data. So it will not be a target for further compromises or criminal activities.
Related: The One Cybersecurity Change Every Business Needs to Make Now
Strategic Phase 3: Operational Resilience and Response
Despite our best efforts in almost everything, be it software or car development, accidents will happen. We must strive not only to become good at preventing attacks, but also to become effective at disaster recovery.
A system should be put in place that allows any device that is compromised or problematic to be quickly removed from the system without causing downtime and endangering other associated devices.
When an accident occurs, forensic investigation and recovery in OT environments are of paramount importance. Rapid recovery strategies include remote log retrieval and a thorough audit capability that can survive a restart.
Today, having a disaster plan is not only optional, but something that is part of regulatory oversight. Frameworks such as UN R155 in automotive cybersecurity and the growing FDA guidance for medical purposes mean that continued security development is needed in terms of market access. They will often look closely for signs of secure development lifecycles, transparent data processing and business plans.
There is a need for a fundamental paradigm shift. For any entrepreneur in the manufacturing industry, it must be recognized that data security and cybersecurity at the device level are critical to the smooth running of business operations. Investing in these things ensures that you can build the trust of your customers and develop your long-term business potential.