Claroty integrates with Rockwell’s FactoryTalk AssetCentre to secure industrial surroundings

Industrial cybersecurity firm Claroty has joined with Rockwell Automation to integrate Claroty’s Continuous Threat Detection (CTD) solution and Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk AssetCentre. The move will enable joint customers to automatically discover, protect, and manage operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments within their industrial surroundings.

Blending CTD’s OT visibility with AssetCentre’s data management capabilities to automate, optimize, and centralize inventory will bring together CTD’s risk and vulnerability assessment and correlation with AssetCentre’s backup and recovery coverage for industrial surroundings and includes highly flexible on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployment options.

The Claroty-Rockwell solution expands the CTD visibility ecosystem with a centralized, fully automated OT asset inventory across the entire OT environment. These insights cover the hardware, firmware, model, rack slot, IP, vendor, and related details for all assets, including those tough-to-identify nested devices and those located at levels 0-2.

It also safeguards critical assets and helps minimize downtime by continuously assessing risks and monitoring for vulnerabilities, automatically correlating this information with the assets in the OT environments, to provide tailored mitigation and remediation guidance for all risks and vulnerabilities affecting those assets.

With this offering, users can expand their disaster recovery coverage by revealing any critical assets not included in the disaster recovery plan, thereby providing users with an opportunity to add those assets and validate asset backup. This is critical in industrial surroundings due to their inherently fragile and utilizing proprietary protocols that make industrial assets and the processes they underpin tough to identify.

The joint offering also increases the efficiency and effectiveness of governance, risk, and compliance initiatives, in addition to the overall decision-making by enabling centralized access, streamlined management, and actionable reporting for the asset, risk, and vulnerability data.

CTD also includes an Enterprise Management Console (EMC) that ensures the visibility scales and can be effortlessly managed across all connected sites. It creates a single source for all OT, IoT, and IIoT asset information and offers both pre-built and customizable reporting suitable for executive-level consumption.

“Many critical industrial assets are at risk due to enterprises’ limited abilities in inventory management, risk and vulnerability correlation, and asset backup,” Grant Geyer, chief product officer of Claroty, said in a media statement. “Visibility is the foundation to every risk management program in the industrial economy. With this solution, asset-intensive organizations can be confident that their OT asset inventory is comprehensive and protected against a variety of cyber security and business continuity risks that threaten resiliency in today’s digital and connected enterprise.”

“The combined technical prowess of Claroty CTD and Rockwell FactoryTalk AssetCentre gives customers visibility into their OT assets and the vulnerabilities and risks facing those assets, as well as full confidence that all critical assets are backed up,” according to Jason (JP) Wright, director of digital design and visualization apps at Rockwell Automation. “Through greater visibility into and protection of OT assets, organizations can improve uptime, productivity, quality, employee safety, and regulatory compliance.”

Claroty had in June secured its Series D financial round of US$140 million, taking the company’s total funding to $235 million. The new funds were expected to provide Claroty with the leverage to expand into new verticals and regions while working towards enhancing its product portfolio. The New York-headquartered company laid down plans to use the funds to meet rapidly accelerating global demand for its Claroty Platform.

The rise in cybersecurity threats, brought about by an increase in the number of cybersecurity and ransomware attacks that targeted the industrial infrastructure environments, such as the Colonial Pipeline attack and Florida water supply attack, has led to greater activity in the industrial cybersecurity space.

Last month, another industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos raised $200 million in Series D funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion, reflecting increasing demand for OT cyber security techniques and solutions. This was preceded by aDolus Technology announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in its latest funding round, which the company will use to pursue an aggressive go-to-market strategy, timed to meet the sharply growing demand for supply chain security solutions, particularly in critical industries.

In August, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory acquired aeCyberSolutions, the industrial cybersecurity business from Applied Engineering Solutions (aeSolutions) to improve Deloitte’s existing cybersecurity offerings with aeCyberSolutions’ business frameworks, methodologies, and technology-enabled tools for industrial control systems (ICS) and OT environments.

Prior to this, critical infrastructure protection company OPSWAT purchased all assets of Bayshore Networks to provide CIP capabilities to OT and ICS environments, for an undisclosed amount.

Anna Ribeiro

Industrial Cyber News Editor. Anna Ribeiro is a freelance journalist with over 14 years of experience in the areas of security, data storage, virtualization and IoT.