Zscaler and Siemens Join Forces to Bring Zero Trust to the Industrial Edge

With Industry 4.0 accelerating the advent of smart factories, being able to effectively address emerging cyber threats targeting Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments has become the new imperative for operators at manufacturing and production plants. When compounded with COVID-19’s shift to hybrid and remote work for the employees who maintain connected factory systems, the urgency quickly escalates.

This is why I’m excited to announce our new partnership with Siemens , the global powerhouse in industrial automation and digitalization. Together, we are offering a highly secure Zero Trust solution that leverages Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) for connecting remote users with critical factory OT and IT systems.

VPNs are a Big Security Risk to Industrial Infrastructure: Traditionally, the manufacturing sector has relied on VPNs for providing OT and IT access for remote employees and third parties, such as plant operators and maintenance technicians. However, VPNs are a legacy technology that effectively leave the back door wide open to potential attacks thus permitting bad actors to enter industrial networks undetected. From a user experience perspective, VPNs create access barriers that stifle performance, reduce productivity, and encourage employees to consider shortcuts. From a security standpoint, every VPN is another attack surface to monitor.?

Partnering with Zscaler enables Siemens to combine its SCALANCE LPE local processing engine with Zscaler Private Access eliminating the need for legacy VPN which creates a big cybersecurity risk. This ensures only authorized users can connect directly to the concerned OT or IT system, without being placed on the network or afforded excessive access to multiple systems.

Diminish Cyber Risk with Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange: Using ZPA’s Zero Trust architecture improves application performance and the user experience while significantly diminishing cyber risks. The experience is fast, seamless, secure and identical whether the systems and applications are located on a factory floor or in the cloud, such as Siemen’s presence on the Microsoft Azure IoT Edge.

I believe this positions ZPA as the Zero Trust gold standard for protecting industrial infrastructures against internal and external cyber threats because it:

Reduces business and operational risk: You can see what’s happening on the network and how assets are communicating—whether it’s an unauthorized user, a process anomaly or an attacker trying to get in.

Minimizes attack surfaces: The industrial network becomes invisible to everyone except authorized users, making it unreachable by attackers and providing the best defense for unpatchable OT and IIoT assets.

Eliminates excessive trust: Internal and third-party personnel are only permitted “need-to-know” access to microsegmented systems and applications, resulting in “virtual” air gaps that are impossible with traditional networks.

No matter your association with the manufacturing industry, whether as a participant, supplier, consultant, insurer or otherwise, I encourage you to learn more about extending Zero Trust to OT and IIoT environments by reading Nicole Bucala’s official Zscaler blog Siemens and Zscaler Partner to Extend Zero Trust Security to the Industrial Edge for Smart Factories .

I also invite you to connect directly with our team of cloud security experts at Zscaler to take a closer look at ZPA and the entire Zero Trust Exchange platform for securing manufacturing and production environments.

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