Leaders in the Oil and Gas Industry are increasingly recognizing that an efficient operation depends on cybersecurity. With a security fabric, managers and executives gain confidence in their investments to improve their operations shares Duncan Greatwood, CEO at Xage.

“We recently met with a customer, and I politely said to them probably 80 percent of their equipment in the field was unprotected. The customer burst out laughing and said do you really think it’s only 80 percent?”

Charles Drobny, President and CEO at GlobaLogix explains that many firms in the industry have undertaken IoT initiatives as part of their drives for efficiency. Expectations for these integrated technologies is high.

Greatwood states that the risks are high as well because the promise of IoT depends on a high degree of integration between users, sensors, systems and devices, many previously standalone, plus on enabling remote access.

In this highly integrated environment, an engineer at one remote oil pad may be able to access all of the other oil pads in the operation. A successful penetration in one device in a remote part of a network can put the entire operation at risk.

Greatwood shares that with a security fabric covering the entire system and controlling each interaction between devices and users, firms can assign and limit access to the people who need it.

Drobny and Greatwood agree that, with the Xage cybersecurity fabric, firms can manage and apply access control policies across their heterogeneous networks that may include unprotected legacy systems. And as technology evolves and new devices and systems are adopted, the Xage security fabric expands to cover new systems as well.