While IT and controls engineering traditionally have been two widely separate disciplines, the adoption of Ethernet for industrial networking has increasingly brought the two worlds together. Then along comes the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), with more and more connected devices. Now the need to marry engineering expertise with IT smarts is vital for keeping production networks humming.

My previous article covered part of Scott Howard's presentation on ICS Security for Oil and Gas applications from this year's Design Seminar. In that article, we reviewed some of the cyber security fundamentals discussed by Scott.

This year, the Belden Industrial Ethernet Infrastructure Design Seminar is being held in Houston and therefore a number of the sessions are focusing on applications for the oil and gas sector. I had the privilege of attending Scott Howard’s session on cyber security. In it, he reviewed the primary goals of cyber security measures in industrial networks:

About 6 months ago I wrote an article for this blog about the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. The article described how the framework came to be, what it is, what it is supposed to do and what you should do about it.

Jeff Smith of American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM) is a guru in the world of industrial Ethernet networking and ICS Security. We were fortunate to have him speak again at the 2013 Belden Industrial Ethernet Infrastructure Design Seminar.