Fuelling growth through digitalisation
Discover how a global energy company partnered with Hexagon to drive digital transformation at their industrial facilities.
Business benefits at a glance:
- Foundational cybersecurity capabilities enable OT system hardening and cyber risk reduction
- Increases confidence in OT data quality when making business decisions
- Provides a data foundation for digital transformation and operational excellence initiatives
- Enables enterprise-wide visibility into both production and safety cybersecurity risk
- Allows enterprise scalability, performance and platform independence
Digitalisation, big data and data lakes are used to boost operational productivity, drive efficiencies across global production assets and enable better, faster decision-making.
The digitalisation team at an integrated oil and gas company — operating across five continents — knew their multi-vendor industrial control systems (ICS) contained large amounts of valuable data to collect and analyse. This data comes from complex industrial automation systems across Europe, North America and Asia. Obtaining required control system inventory and configuration data and ensuring data integrity as data flowed from Level 0, 1 and 2 devices to their cloud-based data lake was a significant challenge.
Initially the digitalisation team evaluated working with multiple automation vendors to obtain the required data feeds. However, each vendor collected and labelled data differently. This made understanding operational technology (OT) asset inventory, configurations and interconnections difficult.
Concurrently, the company’s cybersecurity team was searching for an enterprise-wide cybersecurity solution that could harden its heterogeneous OT assets against internal and external cyber threats, meet internal and external compliance requirements and reduce cyber risks to acceptable levels.
Partnering for digital transformation success
During conversations with Hexagon, the cybersecurity team quickly realised that PAS Cyber Integrity and PAS Automation Integrity’s ability to deliver detailed inventory data, display topological views of asset and site connections, monitor configuration baselines and manage change across more than 120 different types of OT assets could provide value to not only the cybersecurity team, but also to the digitalisation team. After careful evaluation, the company selected Hexagon.
The cybersecurity team now uses Cyber Integrity to obtain comprehensive visibility into OT asset inventory, vulnerabilities, configurations and risks across their fleet of refining and chemical plants. The company’s digitalisation team uses Automation Integrity to obtain deep visibility into OT asset inventory, configurations, control strategies and interdependencies — from the field sensor to the cloud. Automation Integrity collects and sends data securely to the digitalisation team’s cloud-based data lake. The digitalisation team then uses this data to optimise global production.
If data integrity questions arise, the team can trace the data flow back to its source in just a few clicks. Both teams are pleased by the level of multi-vendor inventory, vulnerability and configuration data provided. As one executive said,
“Cyber Integrity and Automation Integrity give both teams the data and insight needed to make business decisions that improve production safety, reliability and profitability.”
