As standardization around best security practices can be hard to achieve, 4IR Solution's FactoryStack is positioned to alleviate many of the security challenges surrounding IT/OT convergence.

1. Standardization

Disparate IT and OT systems might follow different security practices. It takes knowledgable professionals from both fields to come up with the proper standards.
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Key Challenges:‍

• Legacy OT systems do lack the security features modern infrastructure can support.
• OT systems might not have any connection to overall IT management making it difficult to apply security patches.
• Lack of mutual knowledge between the IT world and the OT world can make it difficult to plan standards.
• Manual configuration of security systems can be complex and can introduce more variance.‍

FactoryStack's Solution: ‍

• Since FactoryStack is developed to support hybrid OT infrastructure, the entire system is built around a secure IT/OT environment.
• 4IR Solutions developed FactoryStack with the best security practices for both IT and OT in mind.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): FactoryStack's code based deployment method ensures security is defined, versioned, and managed across all clients.
• Consistent Improvement: 4IR Solutions team is always updating the primary code base to ensure FactoryStack's security follows the best standards.

2. Automation

Going hand in hand with Standardization (above), manually configuring security/deployments when converging IT/OT  systems can introduce errors and increase management overhead.

‍Key Challenges: ‍

• Manual configuration can be more difficult to standardize, especially in large multi-site environments where multiple parties are responsible for the deployment.
• Various sites might also mean various Hypervisors, OS versions, software, etc. Each site will come with its own challenges for deployment and management.
• The time it takes to manually configure large systems can delay both project completion times and increase costs.

FactoryStack's Solution:

• FactoryStack's core system is standardized due to being defined by code (IaC). This ensures every core FactoryStack system is deployed exactly the same.
• Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), 4IR can quickly deploy into hybrid environments via automated pipelines.
• Because of the way FactoryStack's architecture is configured, monitoring of all deployed environments is automated regardless of the location of the deployment.
  

3. Disaster Recovery

Hopefully disasters never happen, but if they do a coordinated restoration process will need to take place.‍

Key Challenges:

• Backing up the applications in use is just the tip of the iceberg. Backing up network configurations, security settings, databases, and other services and settings is critical. With manual processes, this can be cumbersome.
• Recovering and restoring manually created systems can be time consuming.
• Care needs to be taken to follow standards when re-deploying systems.
  

FactoryStack's Solution:

• Using software defined infrastructure all primary system configurations, inter-container network settings, security parameters, etc. all is stored as a version code based system.
• Re-deployment using IaC ensures all managed systems will have the exact same settings that existed prior to the disaster.
• Using hardened containerized environments, 4IR ensures all underlying container operating systems and their configurations remain secure and are centrally managed by 4IR's team.
  

4IR Solutions is a leader in providing hybrid OT environments with experience deploying across various industries. Security is a top priority and 4IR ensures all of its deployments are evolving to follow the industry best practices. From our cloud to our manufacturing specialists, we follow established best practices to ensure the hybrid solutions we design are balanced to accommodate feature requirements while maintaining cost effectiveness.

Connect with us to explore hybrid systems that fit your needs.