What do you think it takes to establish effective governance and maintain compliance in an OT environment?
Time?
Effort?
Unique skills?
If you said any or all of the above, you’re on the right track.
But what if we told you that there are so many more considerations to think about?
In fact, governance and compliance often require huge stretches of time and effort from multiple stakeholders. That could be everyone from your OT and IT security teams, all the way to legal and operations teams within an organization.
But the key to managing compliance and governance isn’t just about people and their different skill sets — even though they’re a huge part of it.
Thanks to governance and compliance in OT environments always being on the move, it can be extremely challenging to keep up with the times. That means organizations need to constantly monitor and understand the shifting threats within compliance.
In this blog post, we discuss how important effective governance and compliance is for your OT cybersecurity, what challenges you should watch out for, and how to simplify your efforts in one easy step.
What Goes Into Effective OT Governance?
In the big soup of governance, there are a few key ingredients that take the flavor from tasty to delicious. Here are four important factors to consider:
Policy development |
Developing clear and enforceable policies for managing and protecting OT assets is an essential part of OT cybersecurity governance. This might relate to anything as simple as password policies to as complex as cross-site policies (if you work across multiple sites). |
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Understanding the risk profile of your current OT assets is also vital for protecting your OT cybersecurity. This means having full visibility on your OT assets at all times, monitored to ensure that every asset is staying compliant and following cybersecurity governance and regulations at all times. |
Risk management |
Resource allocation |
Another keystone in effective governance is having systems in place to spot any gaps and bottlenecks. This means teams can counteract these with more effective strategies that will help them improve their organizational OT cybersecurity at scale. These resources might include budget, personnel, and technology investments. |
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None of these measures will accomplish that much without a total buy-in from the leadership in your organization. From your newest intern to the CEO, it’s vital that every member of the organization is educated in the basics of compliance. This means working together towards sustaining and improving cybersecurity. |
Commitment from leadership |
Effective governance is an ongoing process that evolves as the landscape changes and technology shifts. It’s worth noting that none of the ‘ingredients’ above stay fresh for long. Just like actual food, it’s likely to reach its use-by date and need regular replenishment.
One way to boost the ‘shelf life’ of these measures is to ensure a strong relationship between IT and OT professionals.
Together, they can work on factoring this governance into their cybersecurity infrastructure across both systems.
What Compliance Challenges Do Some Organizations Face in OT Environments?
As technology is rapidly evolving, so is the cyber threat landscape. Cyber threats are constantly snapping at cybersecurity’s heels, so it’s a major challenge for organizations to stay compliant and on top of best practices.
And with more complex security threats comes a more complex regulatory environment. Compliance might differ depending on different regulatory bodies and even different jurisdictions, making it even more complicated to achieve.
If that wasn’t enough, many organizations — especially critical infrastructure — have legacy systems that need to be upgraded to meet compliance requirements. It also means having dedicated personnel trained to do these upgrades.
In short, these technical and resource constraints can be costly.
How To Simplify Governance And Maintain Compliance
By now, you’ll understand the enormous responsibilities involved when implementing and maintaining compliance across your OT cybersecurity. You might think that’s a lot. And it is.
But there is an easy way to manage it all.
Technology like the SCADAfence Governance Portal makes these processes much simpler, allowing full compliance with minimal effort on your part.
Ultimately, it means you can enjoy effective governance & OT, and overcome common compliance challenges, all in one easy-to-use portal.
Want to give the SCADAfence Governance Portal a try?