Achieving compliance can often feel like the finish line of a manufacturing cybersecurity program. In reality, it’s the starting point.
Whether it’s CMMC, ISO 27001, IEC 62443, or another regulatory requirement, checking all the boxes doesn’t mean you’ve put the strongest cybersecurity measures in place. Quite the opposite; it means you’ve met the minimum requirements to protect your production equipment, data, and supply chain.
At a time when manufacturing faces more cyber attacks than any other industry, and greater than 1 in every 4 cyber attacks is aimed at the factory floor, cybersecurity couldn’t be more important. Resilience, revenue, and reputation all depend on getting it right, not just being compliant.
This blog highlights how to build on a foundation of compliance to create a strong and sustainable cybersecurity program.
Why Compliance isn’t Confidence
Getting compliant involves putting dozens or possibly hundreds of security controls in place and having their quality and accuracy verified by an objective third party. It’s a meaningful step. However, it’s not the same as being prepared for anything.
That’s because compliance is a point-in time-assessment, while cyber risk is an ever-evolving force. New attacks emerge all the time, old threats change and adapt, and IT environments develop unexpected exposures. Cybersecurity must be constantly keeping pace with a dynamic threat environment. When it’s based around compliance, however, updates only happen occasionally, often long after new risks have arrived.
Since compliance leads to periodic rather than continuous improvements, manufacturers are often unprepared for the attacks they experience, leading to greater losses as a result. The average industrial data breach costs $5.56 million precisely because the security controls in place are ill-equipped to stop the losses even if they are completely compliant.
Cybersecurity confidence starts by getting compliant, but it does not stop at implementing required security controls or focus just on passing audits. Instead, it works to build a cybersecurity program that’s always prepared for attacks that are becoming increasingly inevitable.
Core Elements of Cybersecurity Confidence
One way to improve a cybersecurity program built largely around compliance is to see security controls as recommendations in addition to requirements. For instance, most regulations require strong passwords, which is necessary to comply with, but also points to the importance of careful access controls. Required security controls may not be enough on their own to prevent all types of malicious intrusions, especially as attackers adopt new tactics and techniques.
Secure manufacturers use compliance frameworks as structure to indicate where they need to focus continual improvements. Then they use these core elements to make those improvements both practical and sustainable:
- Governance and Ownership: Cybersecurity will only improve if someone “owns” the responsibility and has a way to govern the process through oversight, analysis, and approvals. Make sure it’s clear who will lead cybersecurity, how they will affect change, and what their goals will be.
- Documentation and Policies: Attacks succeed when cybersecurity is unclear. Detailed policies list exactly what to do in every conceivable situation, thus eliminating uncertainty and mistakes. Documentation then records what was done to reveal where, when, why, and how policies are being followed or failing.
- Technology and Tools: Every piece of technology is also a target, making it vital to catalog all the systems, software, and equipment being used, as well as their security requirements and vulnerabilities. That catalog then informs what cybersecurity tools are necessary to have in place, and what protection they must provide.
- Training and Awareness: Humans are the biggest cybersecurity risk, in part because training and awareness tends to be sporadic and shallow. Make training a bigger part of the employee experience, from onboarding onwards, and keep everyone aware of new risks, threats, and policies, from executives downwards.
- Progress and Persistence: Cybersecurity steadily grows stronger when manufacturers adopt a continuous improvement mindset and track the metrics that matter to leadership. Replace a paradigm based on compliant/non-compliant with one based on improving/declining and start collecting the data to reveal if cyber risk is rising or falling.
Tomorrow’s Success Comes from Today’s Cybersecurity
When you stop thinking about cybersecurity in compliance terms, you start to see it as an opportunity rather than an obligation. Strong cybersecurity doesn’t just put you on the right side of regulators. It makes you more attractive to clients, more agile when undergoing digital transformation, and more immune to cyber attacks that could kill your momentum. In that way, cybersecurity is not a requirement; it’s an accelerant.
If you’re working to get compliant, go beyond compliance, or build true confidence, Guide Technologies is your manufacturing cybersecurity partner. Our experts can assess your strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. Then build a cybersecurity program that’s as efficient and cost-effective as it is secure and sustainable.
It’s a proven formula: drive success with cybersecurity. Contact Guide Technologies to show you how.
