One of the best parts of the Belden Industrial Ethernet Infrastructure Design Seminar, held last week in Chicago, was the lively presentation given by two of Belden and Tripwire’s top experts on industrial cybersecurity:

Industrial wireless is being used to improve availability and reduce costs in a wide variety of applications. For example, a large coal preparation facility uses a tablet application for mobile ICS system monitoring and troubleshooting.

Do you have a visual map of your Ethernet communications infrastructure? Can you quickly tell which links are up and which are down on your network? Are you notified when a rogue device is added? Do you know which devices and protocols are locked down from a security perspective?

How is your organization doing relative to others in terms of how many security breaches occur on your control systems and how well you identify their sources? What about the size of your security budget versus others? Or how well you are managing the convergence of IT and OT systems?

If you’re like me, when you don’t know how to do something you avoid or delay doing it. Even though I love learning new things and tackling new adventures, in the context of work, there never seems to be enough time. That means taking on a new challenge or learning best practices about a new topic is often put on the back burner.