Article by: Isobelle Bowdery (Fortinet) and Sherelle Farrington (Fortinet)
Expert Assessments
The manufacturing industry is leveraging the speed, agility, and disruptive power of the cloud to achieve its business goals faster. From improved operational efficiency to greater scalability and innovation, the cloud enables manufacturers to respond quickly to market fluctuations and increase profitability. Cyber resilience is critical to this success – and executives all the way up to the C-suite are increasingly recognizing how essential it is to achieving their business goals.
The opportunity of cloud security
Cloud is about speed and agility, and that’s exactly what cloud security is all about. Security solutions are available on demand, globally and at scale – at all stages of the application lifecycle. Automated cybersecurity enables continuous and proactive identification, prioritization, and remediation of risks throughout the lifecycle, allowing teams to close security gaps before attackers exploit them. Cybercriminals have been known to target every cloud component of the manufacturing ecosystem – from the factory to the supply chain to brick-and-mortar and virtual points of sale. That’s why cyber resilience needs to be built into every element from the start. 82% of security breaches affect cloud environments
With the “Secure by Design” approach, the manufacturing industry is pursuing exactly the principle it has been living for decades – to embed trust and resilience as the digital equivalent of security and reliability as an integral part of the corporate culture. In fact, “secure by design” is the only effective way to manage risk in agile cloud environments.
Promote cloud culture, practices, and mindset
Cloud is a whole new way of working—and security teams need to adapt to that paradigm. Cybersecurity is now code, embedded in automated workflows, using the same DevOps practices and tools as development teams. This represents a huge change for security departments – both in terms of culture and mindset and way of working. It is therefore crucial to invest in these teams and support them in this change. And it doesn’t just affect technical teams. The cloud also has a significant impact on purchasing. We are seeing a rapid adoption of cloud marketplaces as the preferred transaction mechanism – not only for computing power and storage, but also for cybersecurity. Teams want to leverage their trusted and preferred partners like Fortinet through these platforms with a digital shopping experience. Speed and agility aren’t just for cloud teams.
Cloud Collaboration
One of the top priorities is to break down silos. Cloud is still treated as a standalone project and security as an annoying add-on – but this couldn’t be further from reality. Cloud is a strategic initiative, and incorporating security right at the beginning of a project is a real game-changer: more secure projects, better user experience, and more resilience – and faster to market. In addition, “Everything as Code” can also be used to fully automate compliance and regulatory requirements, making assessments and reports simple and proactive.
In focus: Automotive industry
For example, if a team is working on a new in-car application, data security is at the top of the agenda. Important questions are: – Who and what is allowed to access this data? - Who and with what is this data shared? - How can the entire ecosystem be integrated? Organizations need to consider how attackers target the individual components of their ecosystem – and ask: – How do we secure it throughout the entire software lifecycle? - How do we deliver the resilient, always-on digital experience that our business demands and that our users expect today? That’s where a platform approach to cybersecurity comes in, one that works seamlessly with all the different elements of the manufacturing ecosystem—including all cloud environments. This allows this diverse, distributed system to be made faster and more resilient. A “Cloud Center of Excellence” (CCoE) is crucial to bring together all relevant stakeholders and make the vision of secure manufacturing in the cloud a reality.
Three key words show how cloud security is helping the manufacturing industry realize this vision:
Agile
Resilience and agility deliver what the business and its teams need to succeed through continuous innovation in cybersecurity solutions, deployment models, and consumption options that facilitate trust, user experience, and resilience.
Intelligent
Securing today’s complex and diverse digital environment is impossible without integrating intelligence, especially given the speed and agility of modern threat actors. These include AI for efficiency, machine learning to reduce friction, and automation for security by design. Intelligent platforms must also include integrated AI assistants that train and educate teams – because this is the only way to develop and secure the urgently needed cybersecurity expertise.
Collaborative
All the cybersecurity elements required for cloud resilience must work together natively – as part of a platform structure. At the same time, this platform must be part of an open ecosystem: it must work with the global threat community, integrate with the cloud-native environment, and be interoperable with other vendors. Collaboration is crucial for trust and resilience – and thus for the success of market leaders.
