Complex, hybrid manufacturing needs strong security. Here’s how CISOs can get it done

In critical infrastructure sectors like manufacturing, CISOs must tackle the rapidly-evolving threat landscape in IT and OT environments and simultaneously embrace digital transformation and cloud adoption. While cloud services offer significant opportunities for operational and security enhancements, including data-driven and AI-powered optimization, the core business value that cloud can offer is to better ensure safe and secure hybrid manufacturing operations.

A CISO’s top priority is to protect business operations, ensure process safety, and maintain the productivity, availability, and reliability of the manufacturing operation. Security teams are tasked with protecting and defending against threat actors who want to impede or stop production by exploiting attack vectors such as vulnerabilities, insecure internet exposure, and weak identity and access management.

Building on their collective knowledge and field experience, Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO have developed actionable security guidance for hybrid manufacturing OT networks. We want security and engineering teams to be able to modernize their engineering processes and optimize their business functions in a safe, secure, and resilient manner.

We look at critical areas for improvement, including how CISOs and their security teams can securely digitize operations, drive down costs, and help generate new revenue streams while maintaining process safety. Our report can empower CISOs by helping them better align with their peers on secure and resilient operations.

We also provide strategic, operational, and tactical security checklists designed to be used in hybrid OT operations with on-premises and cloud environments. To help you get started, we’ve summarized the 11 key sections and actions you can take to get going. 

1. Secure your strategic cloud transformation reframes securely migrating and integrating manufacturing IT, OT, product engineering, and supply chain systems to the cloud to incorporate  threat intelligence and Google's shared fate model.

Start by identifying opportunity spaces across enterprise IT, industrial OT, product engineering, and supply chain domains. Equip the security engineering, security operations, GRC, and functional manufacturing and automation teams with OT and cloud security expertise. Use leading indicators of measurements to quantifiably track and achieve cyber-physical resilience.

2. Embed security-by-design, security-by-default, and security-in-deployment principles and practices into the design, default configurations, and deployment of OT systems and networks in cloud-connected environments.

Start by adopting the foundational principles of defense-in-depth, segmentation, hardening, boundary protection, and robust access controls to structure effective security strategy and operations.  

3. Incorporate an asset management program to establish and maintain robust insight into IT, OT, and cloud network components, and the pertinent connections and dataflows between those networks, with up-to-date documentation and continuous monitoring.

Start by establishing organizational requirements along with identifying accountable entities to ensure an inventory of IT, OT, and cloud assets (hardware and software), configuration baselines, and dataflows and connections.

4. Adopt cyber-physical modularity in engineering process design to ensure resilience across on-premises and cloud from cascading failures in the enterprise and in industrial operations.

Start by identifying essential services and systems that require precedence and high levels of sustainability to achieve minimum viable operational delivery objectives in the event of disruptions.

5. Minimize attack surface and internet exposure to reduce unnecessary internet exposure for OT systems, and to establish redundant communication channels for critical processes.

Start by identifying and eliminating all unintended and unnecessary OT exposures to the internet. Ensure no impact to safety or productivity in this process.

6. Maintain manual operations and safety as a backup method for critical OT systems, and ensure the isolation and non-exposure of safety systems to mitigate risks during automation failures and compromises.

Start by identifying and testing automation-dependent processes for localized manual operations as a backup when automation fails to ensure the isolation of critical operations and safety systems.

7. Embrace software and hardware process reproducibility through the use of development environments, digital twins, version control, and secure supply chain practices for more secure, resilient updates and deployments.

Start by assessing the maturity of the current software and hardware process reproducibility. Identify gaps and opportunities to enforce development environments and digital twins for continuous security testing without impairing operations and safety.

8. Encourage preventive maintenance and security testing across the enterprise and industrial environments to anticipate failures and avoid inadvertent operational downtime, while prioritizing safety. This can include site acceptance testing (SAT) and factory acceptance testing (FAT), and security assessments such as red teaming and purple teaming.

Start by identifying the enterprise and industrial systems across on-premises and cloud. Identify pertinent security and preventative maintenance tests that should be integral to those processes.

9. Focus on supply chain transparency into the overall supply chain and third-party dependencies for the enterprise and industrial processes and assets to gain a better understanding of your organization’s risk profile.

Start by establishing security processes such as the third-party risk management program throughout the procurement life cycle, and ensuring secure product design and deployment. 

10. Create incident response and disaster recovery plans specifically tailored for IT and OT environments, including periodic testing, tabletop exercises, hard-restart recovery plans, and secure communication mechanisms.

Start by establishing an incident response and business continuity/disaster recovery program that is relevant for enterprise and industrial operations that is inclusive of IT and OT systems that are on-premises and cloud-connected.

11. Use Google Cloud tools and services for secure OT connectivity because of our secure-by-design segmented architecture. Technologies such as Manufacturing Data Engine (MDE), Google Distributed Cloud (GDC), and Google Unified Security can help build secure OT connectivity, data flow, monitoring, detection, alerting, analytics, response, and recovery.

Start by using our recommendations for secure segmented architectures to establish projects in accordance with business and engineering needs.

We believe that making manufacturing and industrial cyber-physical networks more resilient will require a multifaceted approach to securing IT and OT systems across hybrid on-premises and multicloud networks. The goal is to digitally transform, embrace new technologies, and rapidly optimize business operations, while ensuring security, safety, and resilience of the underlying industrial operations and systems. 

You can read our full security guidance for cloud-enabled hybrid operational technology networks here. For more leadership guidance from Google Cloud experts, please see our CISO Insights hub.