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What is Operational Technology (OT) and How Can You Protect It?

The Claroty Platform is a complete industrial cybersecurity solution that comprises Claroty’s Continuous Threat Detection (CTD), Secure Remote Access (SRA), and Edge technologies. The platform seamlessly integrates with any industrial environment regardless of its scale, architecture, or the maturity of existing cybersecurity programs. Highly flexible and rapid deployment options enable The Claroty Platform to reveal and protect all OT, IoT, and IIoT assets within the network while automatically detecting the earliest indicators of threats to those assets via proprietary detection technologies.

Operational Technology. What Is It?

While everyone has a good grasp of what IT is, many people who don’t have an OT background might wonder what constitutes operational technology or (OT) and what it looks like. Operational technology is any hardware and software that detects or causes a change, through the direct monitoring and/or control of industrial equipment, assets, processes, and events. OT monitors and manages industrial process assets and manufacturing/industrial equipment. OT has existed much longer than IT or information technology, more specifically since we started to use machinery and equipment powered by electricity in factories, buildings, transportation systems, and the utility industry.

Operational technology is everywhere around us. You find it in industrial operations in smart factories, transportation, oil & gas, mining, in the utility industry (electricity, water.), and in facilities such as office buildings and healthcare facilities to give some examples. OT might be invisible to most, but without it, business and the modern way of life wouldn’t be possible.

Over the years, IT and OT have gradually started to converge, working together in more than ever before. With IT-based technologies becoming more integrated with OT networks, the responsibility for OT has greatly evolved. These times of industrial transformation have ultimately led to OT being increasingly mentioned from a cybersecurity perspective. With industrial infrastructures becoming more complex and the ongoing digitization, additional attention is required for OT security.

Are You At Risk Of A Cyber Attack?

In today’s day and age, having a strong cybersecurity solution integrated into your business has never been more important.  Protecting your networks and sensitive data is crucial to keeping your operations running. A strong cybersecurity platform has layers of protection to defend against cybercrime, including cyber attacks that attempt to access, change, or destroy data.

Cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021. Put it this way, if cybercrime were measured as a country, then it would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. This issue doesn’t appear to be getting any better as experts predict that global cybercrime will grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, costing businesses up to $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015. Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

While you may think that your IT network is secure, chances are there are backdoors for hackers to get into through your operational technology around your workplace. Things in your building such as machinery, building alarms, sensors, or even a thermometer in a fish tank could be used as a back door for hackers to access your network. Yes, a fish tank thermometer… Seriously, it’s happened before. To truly protect your business and mitigate your risk you need Claroty’s comprehensive platform that empowers you to identify, manage, and protect your OT, IoT, and IIoT assets, ultimately allowing you to operate your business with complete peace of mind.

Trusted by the U.S. government and the world’s largest enterprises across all industries, Claroty helps customers reveal, protect, and manage their OT, IoT, and IIoT assets. The company’s comprehensive platform connects seamlessly with customers’ existing infrastructure and programs while providing a full range of industrial cybersecurity controls for visibility, threat detection, risk, and vulnerability management, and secure remote access—all with a significantly reduced total cost of ownership. Claroty’s mission is to secure the technology that sustains our lives, providing unmatched visibility, protection & threat detection across all cyber-physical systems in Industrial, Healthcare, and Commercial environments.

Powered by our Continuous Threat Detection (CTD) and Secure Remote Access (SRA) solutions, our platform provides a full range of industrial cybersecurity controls that integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, scale effortlessly, and have the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Effective industrial cybersecurity starts with knowing what needs to be secured. Claroty’s platform arms you with this knowledge by revealing and contextualizing 100% of your network’s contents, including its invisible or poorly understood contents. The result is a centralized, easy-to-manage, and always up-to-date inventory of all OT, IoT, and IIoT assets, processes, and connectivity paths in your network, as well as definitive insight into what normal looks like.

After revealing what’s in your network, Claroty’s platform enables you to tackle its inherent risk factors, from critical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to poor security hygiene among personnel, to unreliable, unmonitored, and inefficient remote access mechanisms that hinder your remote workforce’s ability to repair assets and maintain uptime and resiliency.

A harsh reality of industrial cybersecurity is no matter which protective controls you implement to manage risk, you cannot eliminate it. No network is immune to threats, so being able to detect and respond to them quickly and effectively when they do surface is imperative. Claroty’s resilient platform threat detection model empowers you to do just this.

Industrial networks power business. Efforts to secure and optimize these networks are cut off from the rest of the business. This needs to change; and for Claroty customers, it already has. The Claroty platform removes the barriers that limit industrial networks from securely connecting to what enables the rest of the business to operate and innovate with an acceptable level of risk.

Start your Cybersecurity Journey with ValuTrack

Protect your industrial environment and secure the technology that sustains our lives, providing unmatched visibility, protection & threat detection across all cyber-physical systems. ValuTrack can help set you up with a Claroty comprehensive industrial cybersecurity solution to keep your business secure. For more information contact a ValuTrack specialist at 877-484-8187 or [email protected].

Effective industrial cybersecurity starts with knowing the connectivity paths in your network as well as what needs to be secured. The Claroty Platform reveals and protects all OT, IoT, and IIoT assets within the network while automatically detecting the earliest indicators of threats to those assets via proprietary detection technologies.

Leading in healthcare IoT security in hospitals and medical centers around the world, Medigate gives you the power to secure the Extended Internet of Things (XIoT) by delivering unmatched visibility, protection, and threat detection for all connected organizations via one comprehensive solution, dedicated to Healthcare and Life Sciences Environments.

2023-10-18T22:19:18+04:00June 22nd, 2022|Claroty|

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