IT/OT SOC
Mitigating real time cyber risk with Sapphire’s IT/OT SOC
OT underpins much of our critical national infrastructure (CNI) across water, energy, transportation and logistics, aerospace and defence, food and beverage, chemicals and pharmaceutical sectors. You will also find elements of OT supporting all modern enterprises, from IoT within data centres to physical security systems, CCTV, HVAC, elevators and escalators within office spaces.
Generally, OT suffers from multiple cyber security issues, including a high prevalence of legacy systems (with average lifecycles measured in decades), often insecure-by-design systems that prioritise availability with limited resources, many of which have significant potential consequences if they were to fail – with many industrial organisations facing both significant financial losses and potential safety implications.
Threat
The threat to our CNI continues to rise, with the number of cyber incidents and their impact increasing year-on-year. Industrial organisations continue to be a high-value target for attackers due to the relative ease of disruption, leading to interest from nation-state-aligned groups and those using ransomware to demand higher ransoms. The manufacturing sector continues to top lists of those experiencing the most attacks, paying the highest cyber insurance premiums, claiming the most on their policies, and experiencing the highest recovery costs.
Why Now?
Industry 4.0 has seen the digital transformation of our industries, enabling real-time decision-making and higher levels of productivity, flexibility, and agility. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of eroding the only level of cyber protection these systems often had – airgaps. The convergence of IT and OT environments has significantly increased the threat to our industrial environments without introducing risk mitigations. This has led to the increase in cyber incidents and cyber insurance costs we are now experiencing, increasing levels of government regulation to tackle the issue. These factors drive board-level engagement with cyber security, with many industrial organisations now acknowledging operational cyber risk as one of their top priorities across their entire business.
IT/OT SOC
As your IT and OT environments converge ever closer and the lines between them blur, you need to ensure your SOC can provide adequate cover across your entire IT/OT estate. Sapphire utilises OT-specific cyber solutions to gain in-depth visibility, working around the specialist requirements and constraints standard in operational networks, ensuring a single-pane-of-glass view of your entire environment. We operate with our own proprietary suite of OT cyber solutions and an expertly selected portfolio of partner technology solutions to underpin our IT/OT SOC, ensuring each client’s uniquely designed cyber architecture provides a measurable return on investment and cyber risk mitigation. Our SOC analysts are trained in OT cyber incident management to identify and triage incidents in real-time, mindful of the differing priorities of confidentiality, integrity and availability across the IT/OT divide. With OT-utilising organisations experiencing numerous OT cyber incidents a year, Sapphire’s IT/OT SOC will significantly reduce the potential impact and recovery time on your critical infrastructure.
