Most industrial networks were not designed; they accreted. A switch added for a new line, a router dropped in for the warehouse, a remote site bolted on with whatever connectivity was available that month. The result works until it has to be secured, audited, or...
The purchase price of an industrial firewall is the part of its cost that is easiest to see and least likely to surprise you. The expensive surprises live elsewhere: in the recurring security subscriptions, in the support tier, in the firmware policy that quietly...
The defining constraint of operational-technology security is that you usually cannot do the obvious thing. You cannot patch the PLC, because patching means downtime and downtime means lost production or a tripped safety system. You cannot reimage the twelve-year-old...
An unmanned solar farm, a remote pumping station, or a mine perimeter has a problem an office never has: there may be no wired internet, and there is no one on site to reboot a router when the link drops. For these sites the WAN is cellular, and the quality of the...
A rugged firewall series usually spans a dozen variants that look almost identical on a shelf and behave very differently in the field. The catalogue lists them by performance tier, but performance is rarely what decides the right model for an industrial site....
A firewall datasheet is a sales document dressed as an engineering document. Every number on it is true, and almost every number is also optimistic. For office IT that rarely matters. For an industrial buyer specifying a device that will sit in a substation, a mine...
