Adopting New Cyber Technologies - The Additional Footprint!!

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The upfront cost of adopting critical new technology is becoming a significant monetary burden on organizations. From personnel and equipment to training and other resources, the process involves a major turnaround to a accommodate the physical footprint in addition to the financial toll.

For instance, when a petrochemical plant implements a new vulnerability management system, specially if it was a passive solution, the software, hardware, and technical personnel cost and the time to implement can quickly add up. Businesses must account for all of that before initiating the adoption process. Here’s a look at the additional footprint of adopting new technology.

Problems Arising With Adopting New Technologies

Adopting new technology isn’t as resource intensive for a small organization as for large companies. The situation is much more complex when you factor in the criticality of availability in production environments in industries such as the petrochemical, biotechnology, oil and gas, and energy sectors.  

There’s limited room for acceptable change in these industries, and technological adoption has to stay within its confines. Some problems that come with adopting new technology in these industries are:

Additional Hardware and Software: New technologies require extensive infrastructure to run smoothly. Hardware and software components take up physical space, cost money, require trained personnel for efficient operability, and need regular maintenance. Businesses must evaluate the practicality of purchasing 100s of thousands of dollars in 3rd-party equipment to run a single platform.

Additional Footprint: Depending on the technology, you may have to install rack units, servers, cooling systems, cables, power systems, instrument lines and more. These components have a physical footprint you might not have, not to mention that some systems such as the cooling systems may also have an environmental footprint.

Personnel Overhead: You have to put together Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) teams to configure while keeping systems available, have OT and technology vendors teams to assess, design, plan and test before implementing the changes.

Additional Engineering: Installation may be a one-time process. But there are always additional engineering needs. You may have to use third-party services and personnel that must collaborate extensively to make the right decisions about adopting new technology. The communication and feedback loops could take months of planning and execution, increasing the time to completion.

The Impact of New Technology Adoption

The issues mentioned above are all cost-intensive processes that can bring your technology adoption and deployment expenditure to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Besides, adopting a new technology takes a lot of brainstorming and planning. A lot more goes into this process than simply buying hardware or software off the shelf. You also have to plan investments in resources and in personnel.

The bad news is that even after all this effort and expenditure, you’ll most likely have a proprietary solution that you cannot replace without having to repeat the same process.

What's the Fix?

Novaigu’s solution to the extensive physical, financial, and personnel footprints of adopting new technology is to use an adaptable non-intrusive deployment model. Unlike conventional systems that leave you with a static proprietary solution, Novaigu offers a comprehensive agentless solution with adaptable deployment modes to help you dynamically transform and switch to our solutions without incurring the high costs of technology adoption.

The best part? The turnaround time can be as short as three weeks. Get in touch to learn more.

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Case Study - Team Backlog

— Trigger

  • Organization is in a firefighting mode.
  • Spending money is creating additional requirements, and open new attack vectors.

— Challenge

  • 23 facilities globally.
  • Inconsistency in results between regions.
  • Different solutions deployed on each site to mitigate the same threats.
  • New management has no visibility or historical data to rely on in decision making.

Novaigu Platform

  • Identify the organization risk profile.
  • Discover and assess assets to establish a cybersecurity baseline.
  • Implement a cyber security maturity roadmap.
  • Implement mitigations based on criticality to improve resilience.
  • Reassess on regular basis to measure maturity and budgeting requirement.

Case Study - Regulatory Compliance

— Trigger

  • Change in Regulatory and Compliance requirements.
  • Implement a cyber security program and assess their maturity on annual bases.
  • Three facilities in the US and Canada.

— Challenge

  • Large quantity of assets (170 network devices, 340 systems, 1000s of network connected field devices per site).
  • Reliance on the IT team to manage their assets.
  • Five specialized resources and six months to complete the task.

Novaigu Platform

  • Identify ICS/OT assets and define ownership, responsibility and accountability, and segregate OT and IT assets.
  • Reduce efforts, logistics and time required to one week per site.
  • Execute a vulnerability Assessment to evaluate weaknesses in security controls (per frameworks and standards) and provide a detailed and prioritized roadmap for the cybersecurity program.
  • No disruption to operators during the activities.
  • Reduce average cost from 340K to 120K a year.

Case Study - Expansions & Upgrades

— Trigger

  • Additional production units.
  • System upgrades and migrations.

— Challenge

  • Lack of staff and skills.
  • New systems interface with the existing environment.
  • Added complexity to inventory and managed assets.
  • Site has no visibility, and the new systems are adding risks.

Novaigu Platform

  • Immediately discover the new connected assets.
  • Scan security configurations on each asset and harden it.
  • Classify and organize assets based on use, functionality and criticality.
  • Execute a vulnerability Assessment to evaluate weaknesses in security controls, user access, patch, AV … etc.
  • Report on gaps and prioritize remediations based on compliances, security lifecycles and maturity levels.
  • The remediations (hardware, software, labor) can upon negotiations contracted to Novaigu professional services for implementation.