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Ask an ExpertProtecting Your Intellectual Property Is Fundamental in the Energy Industry
There are a few characteristics that make the energy sector especially vulnerable to cyber threats, making energy companies a rich target for cybercriminals. Utilities have an ever-increasing attack surface arising from their difficult-to-harden dispersed geographic and third-party supply chain relationships. The energy industry, like most others, has seen an increasing number of cyber-attacks on its intellectual property (IP) and business-critical data. These breaches can have a detrimental effect on organizations with negative press, reputational damage, financial implications, and loss of IPs to competitors. Combine this with regulations like GDPR and potential financial fines as a result of breaches. For all organizations, ensuring all endpoints are secure and can be audited is so important.
Challenge
A leading global specialist partner in the energy industry carried out an IT security assessment across their entire device portfolio. The current strategy allowed all employees to access company data and use any storage device they brought in and plug it into their network. The risk to the organization based on the current endpoint device management strategy was very high. Corrective action was therefore required to mitigate further risk of malware or intellectual property being saved on personal storage devices, removed from the organization, being lost, and/or falling into the hands of a competitor, which would be detrimental for the organization. They also reviewed what type of data employees may need access to via portable storage.
They decided that all office-based employees connected to the network could use SharePoint or similar cloud-based sharing tools to save and share data, which was approximately 60% of the work force. The remaining 40% of employees with field-based jobs would need to be able access the company data outside the Wi-Fi network when on site, on oil rigs for example. They would require an easy-to-use encrypted portable device. They needed to ensure that the new solution they rolled out could be approved and managed by their own endpoint management software. The energy industry specialist partner was also looking to set policies so that unauthorized storage devices cannot be used within their network and will be rejected by their endpoint management based.
The mechanical machine sector of the energy industry is quite niche and extremely competitive, so they knew it was important to roll out this new end point management strategy as quickly as possible to mitigate the risk of losing any intellectual properties, such as machine design patents.
