Tips on maintaining network security

“Network security is vital for protecting the confidentiality, availability and integrity of a company’s assets,” says Steve Sands, head of product management at Festo. “The paper clearly shows engineers how the IoT Gateway can be connected to the Internet while maintaining the network architecture for all other network hosts, and therefore ensuring secure communication.” 

The paper – Using the IoT Gateway in Enterprise Networks – outlines traditional production network structures in the manufacturing industry and describes how they have typically been separated from the Internet. However, with the advance of Industry 4.0 there is a need for increased communication from controller to controller or subsystem to subsystem, and for horizontal as well as vertical connectivity with a single, uniform information model – including the Cloud. The paper goes on to discuss the imperative for architectures to be developed that will allow a second communication channel for read-only access to information in field devices while leaving the hierarchy for control untouched.

Festo's IoT Gateway connects components and modules from field level to the Cloud. The company says this will enable machine and system builders as well as end customers to improve their overall equipment effectiveness. The technical paper describes a solution using Debian GNU/Linux in a virtual machine to connect the IoT Gateway to the Festo Cloud while complying with the latest security recommendations.

Sands continues: “In a worked example, the technical paper details a low cost approach for companies to ensure their data is protected from cyber-attack, but the concepts also apply to more complex enterprise networks with hardware firewalls.”

The paper is available to download from www.festo.co.uk/i4securitytechpaper