What Are the Benefits of Adopting the Cloud in Industrial Cybersecurity? | 7wData

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Cloud adoption has come a long way from its early days where corporate executives questioned the stewardship of their data. The initial suspicions of “where’s my data” have been laid to rest, as administrative tools and contractual obligations have emerged to give better visibility to, and accountability of, data custodianship. Even the capabilities of technology professionals have been enhanced to include full certification paths towards demonstrating cloud proficiency.

In the past, part of an organization’s startup costs included a large line item for servers and other computing equipment. Now, entire companies have been created, enabled through the reduced cost of Cloud computing. It would seem that cloud has taken over every company. However, this is not true. Many organizations that relied on security through air-gapped systems are now starting to become internet-connected. This is particularly true in industrial organizations.

While these industries start to use the internet to engage in remote abilities, they are doing so in a way that is reminiscent of earlier computing methods. It would seem that they may be missing a great opportunity to enhance their capabilities by adopting cloud technologies. We asked a group of experts their thoughts about industrial organizations adopting the cloud while also considering cybersecurity. Their responses are shared below.

Industry 4.0 is emerging and has started to drastically change the way industrial organizations operate. Industry 4.0 has several definitions, but I view it as a new industrial paradigm based on digital transformation and Internet-based technological ecosystems such as the Internet of Things (IoT), the industrial internet of things (IIoT), Cloud computing, fog computing, big data, machine learning (ML), deep learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). In order for an industrial organization to begin the journey towards and enjoy the benefits of Industry 4.0, they must adopt digital transformation and Internet-based technological ecosystems.

One such ecosystem is cloud computing. Cloud computing is required for an organization to make this broad leap forward, and the adoption of cloud computing by industrial organizations comes with many benefits. Over the previous years, data have been captured on a small scale with respect to the total amount of available data within OT/ICS networks.

In particular, most of the data we currently collect is based on what is required by a system to be collected such as signals coming from monitoring real-world processes or data related to safety control and safety instrumented systems. However, there are many signals and data within OT/ICS networks that can be captured that are not necessarily a requirement but could be used to enable more secure and smarter industrial environments, i.e., smart factories. This requires large-scale data collection, storage, processing, analytics, and visualizations, however.

This is where the cloud comes into the game. The cloud can offer the resources for this increased scale. The result is innovation such as predictive process modelling, predictive maintenance, and process optimizations. There are cybersecurity implications for this adoption, as well, with both positive and negative results. On the positive side, the massive amount of big data and predictive techniques could be used to enhance our current capabilities to observe malicious activities within an OT/ICS network. The cloud and industry 4.0 can enable innovations that allow visibility and detection of attacks at larger scale and higher dimensions than non-Industry 4.0 organizations.

For example, if a malicious user has gained access to an ICS network and is trying to spoof signals sent to a human-machine interface (HMI) in order to achieve some goal, real-time data processing and ML-based predictive modelling in the cloud could be used to alert on suspicious activity.