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.

When you have a job to do, tools that are simple to use and designed for your industry go a long way towards helping you achieve results. In the area of ICS security the Belden philosophy is that industrial security needs to be simple in order to be effective.

“Engineers not specializing in cyber security often throw their hands up at security, it’s not what they do,” says Pat Differ, Director of Sales at Securicon LLC, a consulting firm specializing in cyber security services and solutions for critical infrastructure industries. “The result is they may end up relying heavily on IT-oriented or recommended solutions that are not meant for industrial applications.”

Remember the good old days when the control network stood on its own and no one but engineering could touch it? There were no connections to the enterprise network or the Internet. Cyber attackers were happy focusing on financial institutions, and the operations staff was free to just get on with making products.