Cyber Senate are pleased to welcome back Ayman Al Issa, Industrial Cybersecurity Lead and Senior Expert, McKinsey and Company as a key presenter and workshop leader for the 7th annual Industrial Control Cybersecurity Europe conference, taking place online November 3/4th GMT.

Ayman will present on November 3rd, “Cloud for the OT environment: Being realistic about what is possible.” He will also run a workshop for Cyber Senate attendees “Workshop ‘Designing a Secure Reference Architecture for Plant Operations and Maintenance.”

Workshop Overview: Industrial infrastructure owners are closely looking at enhancing their operations and maintenance, improving production through advancing into several initiatives such as digital transformation, advanced analytics, digital twins, etc. Getting real-time data from the factory floor to the corporate floor is no more an option and the integration between the OT and IT is the first step to enable owners to excel in the way of operating their plants.

Secure architecture is not only about sketching lines on a paper. Building the right secure reference architecture and design along with deploying the proper security controls should enable industrial organizations to have a high level of security and at the same time support operations and business needs.

The above is easy to say, but in fact, it is difficult to apply. The complexity and diversity of industrial infrastructures play a major factor in advancing cybersecurity in those environments. Oil and Gas upstream environments are different from the midstream and downstream ones. Power generation environment is different from transmission and distribution. IIoT/IoT based environments are not the same as pure OT environments. The Smart Grid is different from a traditional grid. Securing IT systems, OT systems and systems at the edges would not be also the same, etc. Hence, each environment could have different designs.

Building the right secure reference architecture, designing secure network architecture, developing security zones and applying the proper conduits with the proper security controls is an art that is as vital to reducing the cyber-attack surface as building strong basement foundations for construction to avoid a future devastating collapse.

The purpose of this session is to go through several scenarios to understand the business enablers and design the right security architecture to support business goals and objectives.

The session will be an interactive design session and we welcome your suggestions on the top 3 sectors that you are interested to cover. Ayman will also try to answer challenging design situations that you are interested to crack during the session so that we build the proper Purdue-model-based secure architecture that would enable business needs.

Please send us your suggestions before October 9th to Marketing@cybersenate.com and we look forward to virtually meet with you!