Industrial Defender (www.industrialdefender.com), a developer and supplier of automation system management for security, compliance, and change management of industrial control systems (ICS), announced June 26 the acquisition of Fandotech LLC, a provider of backup and disaster recovery services. The acquisition enables Industrial Defender to debut Survive Services, the Company’s new backup and disaster recovery offering for ICS. Survive Services are built upon Industrial Defender’s Automation Systems Manager (ASM) solution and leverages the capabilities of Fandotech, which adds new data center facilities and over a decade of backup and recovery expertise to Industrial Defender’s portfolio.
Industrial Defender’s ASM solution:
- Integrates security, compliance and change management into one solution
- Improves operational effectiveness
- Offers a unified view across heterogeneous ICS environments
- Reduces the manual tasks associated with change management and compliance activities
- Significantly diminishes security vulnerabilities
Industrial Defender is introducing its Survive Services in response to the significant changes in the ICS threat landscape, complexity of operational systems, increases in field devices and interconnectivity between information systems, the Internet, and other infrastructures. In addition, regulatory requirements, such as NERC CIP, have placed increased demands on operations staff tasked with keeping their production assets and systems up and running. Survive Services are built upon Industrial Defender’s deep domain expertise in industrial control environments, its ASM technology platform, and years of experience with managed security services for operational technology environments.
“Control systems must be available at all times in order to ensure the reliability of critical operations. As described in the Pike Research report, Industrial Control Systems Security, the challenges of managing these heterogeneous, complex, system environments places a heavy burden on existing staff. With regulatory pressure from NERC CIP requiring backup and recovery processes, the need to improve system availability and business continuity is urgent,” declared Bob Lockhart, senior analyst at Pike Research. “Because of internal resource constraints, organizations can benefit from highly experienced providers who understand the unique challenges of operational technology and have back-up and recovery options specific to industrial control systems.”
“The issue is simple. Critical infrastructure operators need their staff to be focused on maintaining uptime of their facilities. However, operations professionals are challenged by the expanding complexity and connectivity of heterogeneous systems that manage that operational environment,” said Brian Ahern, CEO of Industrial Defender. “Our Survive Services are designed to provide essential backup and disaster recovery functionality for operational management systems while providing customers a restoration strategy to minimize unplanned outages. Acquiring Fandotech was a strategic investment we made in order to offer new operational continuity services to our customers and markets. With expert staff and outstanding data center facilities, we can now offer customers the peace of mind that no matter what happens, Industrial Defender can help them maximize their plant uptime by quickly enabling recovery from unforeseen events, meeting compliance mandates, and reducing their security exposures, without placing additional demands on operations staff.”
According to the company, Industrial Defender’s highly secure, SSAE/16 Type II, 24x7x365 data center facility and experienced, fully-certified operational staff, integrating the capabilities of Fandotech combined with Industrial Defender’s ASM technology provides the components necessary to offer a set of managed services that meet the unique operational technology challenges of ICS environments and will stand up to NERC compliance audits.
Survive Services expands upon Industrial Defender’s 24x7 managed services to ensure that customers’ critical operational information is preserved and readily available for recovery. It provides backup and disaster recovery of critical automation system data from clients, servers, and other devices unique to the control system environment such as select intelligent electronic devices (IEDs); human machine interfaces (HMIs), engineering workstations, and remote terminal units (RTUs).
Survive Backup Services provides a managed service that leverages software and expert security personnel to provide monitoring and remediation of onsite or offsite backup services at Industrial Defender’s SSAE/16 Type II data center. Data is securely encrypted in transit and in storage. In the event a disaster occurs at a customer location, data preserved remotely can be securely recovered and restored.
Survive Disaster Recovery Services: If a customer experiences unforeseen outages of an ASM or other critical servers, this service restores the customer’s remote backups to a back-up server hosted at Industrial Defender’s data center. This service affords customers the benefit of operational continuity while repairing or rebuilding their primary infrastructure.
Industrial Defender’s Survive Backup and Disaster Recovery Services are available immediately. For more information, click here.
In an exclusive interview with Automation World, Ahern emphasized that more and more partners are concerned with managing change as part of an overall security management program. The company has been investing in technology and services for many years, and it is continuing to invest for growth. He noted three optional service offerings now available from Industrial Defender. Sustain--includes a visit from an engineer to check for latest versions, that the system is tuned, and the like. Supervise--if customer doesn't have the resources to view configuration files and events and monitor 24/7/365, this offering steps in. Survive--leverage the company's infrastructure, assurance that ID has validated the system at the latest level, and that change over from their system to an ID system in the event of a disaster will happen seamlessly. The goal is to improve customer uptime.
