Industrial IoT platform gets updates from Pulse Secure

Pulse Secure, a provider of Secure Access solutions to both enterprises and service providers, announced the release of Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) 9.0R3 to extend its Zero Trust Security model to IIoT devices and smart factories. The new version enables factories to streamline machinery repairs and diminish costly production downtime through IT-managed secure access. It also secures networks by expanding its behavioral analytics to IoT devices, detecting anomalies and preventing their compromise.

PPS dynamically profiles a network to discover, classify and apply policies to IoT devices and includes a built-in IoT device identification library.  The solution also integrates with Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) solutions to provide identity and device security state data, as well as to fortify micro-segmentation to isolate and manage IoT devices on enterprises networks.

Aberdeen recently reported that 82 percent of companies reported unplanned downtime in the past three years, which can cost a company as much as $260,000 an hour The resulting downtime breaks production and lowers profit, because factory floor repairs often take days when security requirements mandate that service technicians physically visit the factory to diagnose and repair the problem.

How PPS Reduces Risks for Manufacturers

The latest PPS release uses a combined NAC and VPN approach that enables IT teams to grant remote secure access - authenticated and encrypted - to support contractors for expedited repair and return to service of factory IIoT systems for greater uptime and productivity. 

The latest release of PPS also provides sophisticated behavioral analytics that alert security teams of anomalous IoT device behavior and automatically requires added factors of authentication. PPS 9.0 builds baseline behavior profiles for managed and unmanaged IoT devices utilizing information correlated from multiple sources such as NetFlow, user and device data. With these profiles, the platform detects anomalous activity, malware infections and domain generation attacks, allowing security teams to be more responsive to threats and take preemptive measures before attacks succeed.

PPS 9.0 automatically discovers and profiles IIoT systems, such as factory floor SCADAs, PLCs and HMIs, or office building HVAC systems, providing dynamic visibility and securing them by enforcing policies for local and remote access by authorized users and contractors. PPS 9.0 also automatically provisions IIoT devices to next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) to facilitate remote access without provisioning overhead.

“Manufacturing customers are using IoT to retool their factory floors, creating smart production lines that report their health and operational efficiency. One benefit of this approach is that customers can proactively perform preventative or predictive maintenance on machines to avoid costly production outages,” said Prakash Mana, Pulse Secure’s vice president of product management. “Our latest Pulse Secure release helps customers not only secure the smart factory floor, but it also helps streamline their maintenance activities by giving service technicians remote access to the equipment they maintain. Regardless if they are on the factory floor or in their remote office, our Zero Trust Security limits technician access to the equipment they maintain and requires that they use secured end-user devices to perform their work.”