Digital transformation has dramatically reshaped how manufacturing, healthcare, and other critical infrastructure enterprises operate, helping to usher in sustained economic growth coupled with tremendous societal benefits. The rapid adoption of connected technologies is driving increased interconnectivity that provide considerable benefits for these organizations, such as using process data to drive efficiencies and cost reduction, real-time data analysis for better decision making, and supply chain optimization.
However, expanded connectivity has greatly outpaced organizations' ability to manage cyber-physical system risks properly during a period of heightened threat activity due to the availability of malware and the willingness for malicious actors to employ it as a means to achieving their objectives. This has resulted in increasing regulatory pressures as policymakers attempt to rapidly address the cyber risks that have the potential to harm national security, economic stability, and public safety.
As a result, organizations must strike a balance between improving productivity and maintaining regulatory compliance on one hand, with reducing the cyber risk that comes from connectivity on the other. There are diverse approaches to securing their CPS networks today which include:
Attempting to Leverage Existing IT tools for CPS-centric Problems: Many organizations attempt to employ existing IT security infrastructure in their CPS environment for cost savings and simplicity purposes. However, several factors - including system fragility, unique architectures, proprietary protocols, environmental & operational constraints - create operational risks and limit the usefulness and applicability to use these tools for CPS security use cases. As a result, they are generally neither practical nor effective for securing these environments.
Antiquated Approaches to Visibility: Historically, the commonly accepted approach to achieving OT asset visibility relied heavily on passive-only discovery. While meeting the operational risk tolerance objectives of OT stakeholders, this approach requires hardware, configuration changes, and resources to deploy. While valuable, these controls depend on the automation vendor’s implementation∂ and frequently lack the depth of insight into an environment required to achieve cyber risk reduction outcomes.
Lack of Actionable Insights: Using IT-centric and/or limited passive-only means to profile CPS creates an incomplete asset inventory that serves as a weak foundation on which to build a robust program around controls like threat detection, vulnerability management, network segmentation, and more. This means that users are unable to effectively operationalize insights to prioritize, validate, and mobilize remediation actions such as patching or communication policies.
Stitching Together Point Products: Single-purpose CPS security products that primarily focus on solving specific challenges like vulnerability management, network segmentation, secure access, and threat detection have emerged. Gartner estimates that by 2027, 75% of security teams will have on-boarded at least five tools to manage CPS security…a major increase compared with one or two they might use today.” In addition to the increased investment required to deploy, integrate, and maintain multiple products, these cobbled-together approaches lack cohesion, and this point product sprawl creates security blind spots in an increasingly active threat landscape.
These challenges during a time of growing threats against critical infrastructure have created the ideal set of requirements for a CPS protection platform that can effectively reduce CPS cyber risk with a faster time-to-value (TTV) and a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) than provided through multiple vendors.
Enter: The Claroty Platform
Claroty has redefined cyber-physical systems (CPS) protection with an unrivaled industry-centric platform built to secure mission-critical infrastructure. The Claroty Platform provides the deepest asset visibility and the broadest, built-for-CPS solution set in the market comprising exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection – whether in the cloud with Claroty xDome or on-premise with Claroty Continuous Threat Detection (CTD). Claroty enables organizations to effectively reduce CPS risk, with the fastest time-to-value and lower total cost of ownership.
Business Outcome #1: CPS Risk Reduction
Effective CPS risk reduction begins with understanding all assets on the network, how they communicate, and their criticality to business outcomes. Recognizing that no two CPS networks are identical, Claroty employs multiple, distinct discovery methods to create the foundational visibility required to assemble the market's most comprehensive set of built-for-CPS cybersecurity capabilities. Providing Exposure Management, Network Protection, Secure Access, and Threat Detection solutions, Claroty enables critical infrastructure organizations to operationalize in-depth insights about their environments to identify, assess, and prioritize risk–regardless of the scale or maturity of their CPS cybersecurity program.
Exposure Management: Leverage exploitability and the impact of risk on business operations for exposed assets to create a programmatic approach to CPS-specific continuous threat exposure management.
Network Protection: Drive effective network segmentation and anomaly detection with the industry’s first out-of-the-box zone and communication policy recommendations for various CPS based on in-depth insight into operational context and best practices.
Secure Access: Deploy the only purpose-built secure access solution using the industry’s deepest asset profiles and policies to provide privileged access and identity management & governance for first and third-party users.
Threat Detection: Detect known and unknown threats, as well as operational alerts, to protect the integrity and enhance the security of operational environments.
Business Outcome #2: Faster Time-to-Value
Due to the complex architectures and diverse asset types of CPS environments, passive-only approaches to visibility often fall short of building a strong foundation for CPS cybersecurity controls. This is because these environments employ a wide variety of asset types, often across vast geographies or in harsh environments, that operate in business critical processes with low tolerance for downtime or unavailability. Claroty takes a “right-for-me” approach to the discovery process, using multiple, distinct collection methods tailored to the unique challenges and needs of CPS environments. This process often begins without the need for an extensive deployment by taking a hardware-free approach that provides users with a baseline of actionable insights to jumpstart their CPS cybersecurity program. In a new paper from Team82, Claroty found that advanced discovery methods – such as safe querying, Claroty Edge, and integrations with existing asset inventory solutions – provide deep visibility without the need for hardware or configuration changes, and that these methods have matured to the point that their effectiveness rivals that of passive collection.
Claroty automatically identifies gaps in visibility and recommends specific actions that can be taken to fill them. These actions are then orchestrated to enhance the quality of an organization’s asset inventory–building a stronger foundation for exposure management, threat detection, and other core capabilities. The precision and tailor-made nature of discovery paired with continuous, automated enhancement to visibility help users more quickly operationalize their asset inventory, achieving an overall faster time-to-value (TTV) with Claroty.
To read more about Claroty’s approach to optimizing visibility across CPS, check out Team82’s new paper A Non Zero-Sum Game.
Business Outcome #3: Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Claroty's unified platform consolidates the management, monitoring, and control of CPS security, enabling organizations to streamline cyber risk management, manage their security posture with a comprehensive, real-time view of their CPS environment, and address threats. Claroty’s comprehensive solution offering and on-premises or cloud architecture eliminates the need to purchase and maintain multiple point products and provides the flexibility to choose the deployment approach that best suits their scalability needs, cost considerations, and compliance requirements.
As critical infrastructure organizations continue to face new and evolving threats, it’s time for a unified approach to CPS cybersecurity. Backed by award-winning research and alliances with leading automation vendors and medical device manufacturers, our CPS cybersecurity portfolio is tailor-made for the operational, healthcare, and other critical infrastructure networks in which it operates. Our platform integrates with your existing infrastructure to provide a full range of controls for exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection. Empowering your organization to reduce its CPS cyber risk — no matter where you are in your CPS cybersecurity journey.
To learn more about how The Claroty Platform can support your CPS cybersecurity journey, please check out our webpage, read the press release, or simply request a demo.
