Today, the manufacturing industries revolve around customers’ satisfaction and demands as a key indication to successful production. This competitive environment lead to a conclusion by many factories in embracing smart factory as a solution. As the term indicates, smart factory applies digitilisation and automation where machines are connected to smart devices such as internet of thing (IoT) devices and artificial intelligence to increase the efficiency in production. While smart factory have brought many benefits to production and manufacturing processes, it also brought new challenges such as cybersecurity. What are the cybersecurity challenges in smart factory?
Increase in cyber attack surfaces
When a system or a machine is connected to a network, there will be a possibility for it to be exploited by cybercriminals. Smart factory applies the concept of industry 4.0 where data sharing occurs across supply chains and stakeholders. With these data being distributed all through the systems, the number of users having access into the system due to the data sharing increases. While this practice gives visibilities to the stakeholders and suppliers, it also results in the increase in number of access points which lead to the increase in the number of attack points.
Information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT) convergence
One of the main characteristics of smart factory is that it introduces the integration of IT into OT. The IT-OT convergence had always been a challenge in every company that is moving towards digital transformation. The challenges includes the lack of skills and awareness in which OT team have little knowledge about IT security while the IT team have limited knowledge about operational processes. This causes security gap that will make the factory becomes vulnerable to cyber threats.
Increase in cyber threats against protective measures
Cybersecurity is known as one of the existential threats of our time. However, the advance in smart devices especially IoT increases the cyber threats drastically. It is discovered that the increase in cyber threats is exponential to that of protectives measures. Therefore, without continuous monitoring on cybersecurity, downtime may occurs and lead to a lot of loss to production process.
E-SPIN Group in the enterprise ICT solution supply, consulting, project management, training and maintenance support for multinational and government agencies, across the region E-SPIN do business. Please feel free to contact E-SPIN for your inquiry and requirement, so we can assist you on the exact requirement in the packaged solutions that you may required for your cybersecurity management, from assessment, testing, protection and continuous monitoring.
