Armis and Keysight Take on OT

OT Network Visibility and Monitoring Help Healthcare Manufacturer Modernize and Protect Operations     

There’s downtime, and then there’s downtime. In the healthcare industry, mere seconds can make the difference between life and death. In manufacturing, things may not seem that extreme, but disrupting operations for even a few moments can cost manufacturers tens of thousands of dollars in revenues and potentially fines for breaching compliance.

For manufacturers of healthcare devices, both the risks—and challenges—of maintaining peak network performance get compounded. One 125-year-old midwestern US provider of medical devices and diagnostics equipment rose to the challenge by rolling out modern network performance monitoring (NPM) to safeguard operational resilience across 100+ manufacturing facilities.

This blog shares the highlights and how adding a Keysight Network Visibility Platform to deliver analysis-ready traffic to Armis Centrix™ helped the OT team gain asset visibility and reduce risk by segmenting potentially risky devices from the rest of the network.

Modern access, modern challenges

Both the healthcare and manufacturing industries continue to modernize and digitalize their networks and operations to move faster and improve cost-performance, but some vital operations still revolve around legacy systems that can’t be easily upgraded. Failing to monitor newly connected assets could threaten operational resilience and compliance, but doing so might consume significant time and effort— or technically not even be possible.

The US-based multinational provider of medical devices and healthcare technology engaged trusted advisors from CDW to assess its situation and help secure operations. CDW’s evaluation uncovered issues with old Windows machines and other legacy OT systems that could not be upgraded and might eventually cause problems that could bring down operations.

Together, experts devised an easy, cost-effective option: segmenting risky OT devices from the rest of the production network.

You can’t segment (or secure) what you can’t even see

The segmentation plan began with using Armis Centrix™ sensors to find outdated assets that could not be upgraded or properly secured. The sensors detect when assets misbehave or have become so outdated that they can’t be patched or upgraded (and might be susceptible to failure or cyberattack). 

Dynamically micro-segmenting these high-risk components on a separate subnetwork ensures one device failure or exposure doesn’t laterally extend to other areas or impact schedules across an entire assembly line or multiple plants. Deciding which assets might be at risk requires reliable, real-time data from every location across the entire network.

Visibility lights the way forward

To help evaluate—and later implement—the Armis solution, CDW recommended finding a reliable, efficient means of capturing, filtering, and delivering data packets from the network. The customer’s internal IT analysts already used Keysight’s Vision network packet brokers (NPBs) in data centers to pre-process traffic for use by performance and security monitoring tools in data centers at headquarters and corporate locations. 

With strong recommendations coming both from IT and external advisors at CDW, the OT team chose to install a Keysight network visibility platform. CDW’s integration team helped drive the evaluation process start-to-finish then spearheaded the initial rollout of the Armis-Keysight solution at the first 10-20 manufacturing plants. 

Vision helps ensure uptime, compliance, and productivity

Keysight Vision E40 network packet brokers installed at manufacturing sites filter L1-4 packet data, removing unwanted duplicate packets, headers, and other unnecessary traffic before delivering it to Armis. The state-of-the-art Keysight visibility platform:

• Delivers analysis-ready traffic to Armis
• Extends visibility to remote manufacturing sites
• Enables high-capacity processing of OT network traffic and asset data
• Creates an easy to use, scalable solution
• Improves the capacity of the extended tech stack  

While protecting productivity and uptime, the joint solution from Armis and Keysight equips the company to maximize the value of both new and existing investments in monitoring and cybersecurity into the future. Download the full case study to learn more about optimizing delivery of reliable data and improving ROI on OT network monitoring across 100+ manufacturing facilities.

Learn more about joint solutions from Armis and Keysight.

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