Award cites security gain, while keeping premium on information
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Standards-based open systems bring great benefit—but in the world of process control, they also pose risk to the security and safety of plant operations.
"In the past, control systems were built on proprietary platforms that made it difficult for anyone to gain access," says Kevin Staggs, engineering fellow at Honeywell Process Automation, responsible for its cyber-security technology program. "Over the past 10 years, there's been significant movement toward open systems in controls, done for many good reasons. But from a security standpoint, the classic IT model objective is to protect enterprise intellectual property at all costs, whereas from a controls perspective, it is to protect the people, equipment, and environment. Some of the strategies applied to IT are very different from those applied to control systems. This creates an interesting dichotomy between the two."
Honeywell has been an industry leader in reconciling the differences so as to preserve the business benefits of a totally integrated enterprise—from factory floor to boardroom—while at the same time ensuring plant security. The vendor was recognized in April by the SANS Institute, a prominent Washington D.C.-based organization focused on IT security training and certification, for its work.
The 2006 System/SCADA Security Leadership Award cited Honeywell's pioneering initiative to rapidly test and qualify Microsoft security updates—ensuring patches can be safely applied without impacting the safe and reliable control of production operations. The award also recognized development of firewalls integrally built into Honeywell control systems for protection against cyber crime.
"You cannot safely run a plant without a good security system in place," says Staggs. "Honeywell has effectively mitigated that risk with low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf solutions."
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