INDUSTRIES

Manufacturing and industrial IT

The plant floor and the office network want opposite things, and nearly all IT advice is written for the office. A patch window on a production line isn't a patch window on a laptop fleet. The failure we find most often is a flat network between the two, and fixing it rarely means buying new machines.

WHAT APPLIES

Which rules apply to you?

  • OT and IT convergence

    Applies now

    A flat network between plant and office is the common failure, and segmentation is the fix. It's a design problem, not a purchase.

  • Patch windows

    Applies now

    A scheduling problem before it's a security one. Production decides when, and any plan that ignores that gets ignored back.

  • Legacy equipment

    Applies now

    Machines running operating systems nobody supports and nobody's replacing this year. Isolating them properly beats pretending they'll be gone by Q3.

  • ISO 22301

    Applies conditionally

    Business continuity certification, once your larger customers start asking for it in their vendor paperwork.

TECHNOLOGY

Whose kit does this run on?

The platforms we design, build and support. Named because a buyer with an estate already standardised on one of them needs to know before the first call, not after it.

Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Juniper, VMware

QUESTIONS

What buyers in this sector ask.

By treating it as a scheduling problem first. We work to your production calendar, stage and test changes off the line, and accept that some systems only have a window twice a year. A patch plan that ignores the line is a patch plan that never actually runs.

Usually yes. Segmentation is mostly a design and configuration exercise on the network you already have, not a forklift replacement. The reference architecture for separating plant from enterprise has been standard practice for decades, and most plants are closer to it than they expect to be.

They stay, and they get isolated. A machine that can't be patched can still be put somewhere it can't be reached from, and can't reach out. That's a cheaper and more honest answer than a replacement programme nobody has budgeted for this year or next.

Ask how it's checked rather than whether it's true. Most air gaps have a laptop, a USB drive, a vendor's remote-support tunnel or a reporting link crossing them. An air gap that nobody verifies is a diagram, not a control, and shop floor connectivity usually proves it.

If you need the control system itself engineered or revalidated, that's your OEM or your automation integrator. We build and secure the network and the IT around it, and we work alongside them. Knowing which of the two you need saves a procurement cycle.

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