SCADA Cloud Visibility

Industrial networks are looking to virtualize their environments to reduce hardware, infrastructure and facilitation costs as well as enabling
better SCADA software integration into the existing virtualized IT environment.

With the growth in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) deployments, a computer system for gathering and analyzing real-time
data, virtualization has provided challenges to gaining 100% visibility of virtualized SCADA network traffic.

Solution

Migrating a utility substation design to a virtualized SCADA deployment offers many benefits including hardware server consolidation, high availability, migration capabilities, and easier backup and restore processes. However virtualizing a SCADA deployment leads to many challenges including having to reconfigure resource allocation, conflicts with network OS activities and reduced visibility into the substation.

Virtualized SCADA Substation Deployment

Figure 2: Network TAP providing a Fail Safe Solution to Active, In-line tools

Deploying Garland Prisms traffic mirroring with the substation server hypervisors, eliminates this data blind spot, providing the SCADA platform and any other connected system access and visibility. Integrating this virtual packet traffic with physical layer network TAPs and packet brokers provides a complete end-to-end visibility fabric.

Benefits

• Single-sensor for Public/Private cloud
• Private controller for air-gapped architectures
• Supports containers, Linux, and Windows Server
• TLS decryption including 1.3 and predecessors
• Integrates with Garland’s physical network TAPs and packet brokers

Substation Firewall Optimization

Another common utility challenge is firewall optimization within a substation. Updating firewall firmware can mean eliminating access to the substation during the firewall update cycle causing blind spots

Figure 2: Network TAP providing a Fail Safe Solution to Active, In-line tools

Deploying an external Bypass TAP in substation locations, offer the unique ability to implement inline lifecycle management, sandboxing firewall deployments, to easily taking out-of-band for updates, installing patches, performing maintenance or troubleshooting to optimize and validate before pushing back inline, without impacting the availability of the network. Both the bypass TAP and firewall can be remotely managed to automate the entire process.

Benefits

• Scripting support or cloud orchestration
• Maintains control center visibility
• Remote accessibility
• Failover on loss of power
• Ease of configuration

With the constant change, all industrial processes are subject to, companies are taking the leap virtualizing SCADA environments with the ultimate goal to achieve reduced hardware, infrastructure and facilitation costs.

Garland Prism’s cloud visibility addresses this challenge with the industry’s most flexible and feature-rich cloud traffic mirror providing complete visibility into tough to reach encrypted virtual traffic.

Looking to add visibility into your virtualized or industrial environment, but not sure where to start? Join us for a brief network Design-IT Demo or consultation. No obligation - it’s what we love to do.