SIEMENS ENERGY & TENABLE
24
“ Industry 4.0 is bringing the worlds of IT and OT together at an accelerated rate . This results in more IT devices being connected to or living in OT environments , sometimes without the organisation , even knowing ”
— Richard Bussiere , Technical Director , Tenable , APAC
With the rise of decentralised renewable power sources like wind and solar , and the rapid expansion of distributed intelligent energy management devices , the energy space itself is rapidly digitising by employing IoT technology .
“ We see the grid changing from centralised energy production to decentralised – and with that , the intelligence goes all the way to the edge , and the threat attack surface is increasing on the client side ,” Martinot says . “ All of that creates complexity on the security aspect , because as the energy transition is happening , people aren ’ t participating in it .”
At the same time , while criminal actors remain omnipresent , nationstate actors are flexing their muscles even more , especially in Asia , where tensions between countries remain high . These actors have far better funding , deeper know-how and more potent tools , posing a new challenge to cyber defenders in the energy space .
These dynamics are playing out as the Asian region struggles to close its cybersecurity skills gap .
“ As it stands , there ’ s a shortage of talent possessing a combined skillset of OT and cybersecurity . Previously there was no ramp-up of OT enabled skill , so the only choice we have now is to take OT engineers and move them to cyber , because that ’ s the quickest fix . But there ’ s no ground-up OT skill that exists yet , the sector is still too new ,” Martinot says .
MDR closes the gap : Compared to hiring – let alone training – a workforce , the Siemens-Tenable partnership , harnessing MDR , offers a robust , effective solution supported by worldclass expertise .
FEBRUARY 2021