THE BENEFITS OF VISIBILITY FOR IOT AND OT SECURITY

By Garth Braithwaite, Senior Director at Gigamon

To completely eliminate blind-spots, a single pane of glass view into all environments from cloud to onpremises is the best option. This means there will be no piecing together of individual tools as NetOps teams hope not to miss anything, and all devices, data and dangerous actors can be in sight at all times from one integrated platform.

Eradicating these blind-spots is critical in an age in which ransomware poses one of the largest threats to businesses. While IoT might not offer the access to the wider IT system at the moment, the threatscape is fastmoving and businesses must make sure they are ready for criminals to switch their tactics. This is particularly pertinent given that adversaries have changed the way they deploy ransomware dramatically over recent years; rather than a ‘spray and pray’ approach with little skill involved, cybercriminals will carefully target vulnerable organisations and lay dormant on their network for months on end. In fact, the latest stats demonstrate that network dwell time for these criminals’ averages at 285 days.

Optimising Data

Delivering increased visibility not only supports IoT and OT security, it also enables organisations to better scale and boost service performance. Observability into these networks will allow operations teams to recognise whether the right data is being directed to the correct tools, or make changes if this is not the case. Integrating de-duplication processes can reduce the amount of unnecessary traffic running past security monitors in order to prevent packet loss and avoid expensive maintenance or upgrade costs.