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DEFENDING
TODAY’S OT
ENVIRONMENTS
Operational Technology, or OT, including SCADA
(supervisory control and data acquisition) and ICS
(industrial control systems), is a system of hardware
and software designed to monitor and/or control the
physical devices, processes and events used in the
production and operation segments of businesses and
organisations, including critical infrastructure (CI). John
Madisson, Senior Vice President, Products and Solutions
at Fortinet, tells us that OT networks play a critical role
in things like production, manufacturing, defence and
emergency, food and agriculture and financial systems.
He says these systems are traditionally kept separate
from the IT network and are often owned, managed and
operated by a different team.
www.intelligentcio.com
O
T devices and networks can be
deployed anywhere inside a
manufacturing floor, distributed across
a chemical processing plant or out in the Arctic
monitoring oil and gas pipelines. These OT
systems often perform simple yet essential
tasks, such as monitoring a valve and shutting
it off when a certain value is triggered. As a
result, they can perform their tasks with little
change for years, which also means they
sometimes run on ageing operating systems
and obsolete hardware using home grown
applications. Since the goal for an OT system
is to run exactly as designed, even patches
are only applied if they do not hinder the
process of the OT system.
But because these OT architectures run on
a separate and isolated infrastructure, until
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