Despite the various known perks of coalescing OT and IT systems, a handful of businesses today have successfully synergised the two disparate technologies, and only across factory floors. The efficient alignment of siloed IT and OT systems is still underway in many industries. This scenario has left many businesses vulnerable to increased cyber-attacks since security around OT environments technology-wise has traditionally remained archaic. Due to the growing occurrence of cyber-attacks on production lines and OT facilities, organisations are more cognizant about protecting such environments, attempting to connect their production networks with enterprise-grade security applications. To navigate such dynamic cyber-security narratives, companies require contemporary security strategies that take into account every operational level of an organisation. At the forefront of orchestrating these strategies in Europe’s cyber-security landscape is BxC Consulting.

Founded with the aim to address security challenges associated with OT environments, BxC offers support to resolve emerging cyber security threats across corporate and production technology environments. The company fundamentally empowers businesses to evaluate and enhance their security posture by combining IT and OT security protocols. BxC Consulting specialises in security incident event monitoring (SIEM), security operation centre (SOC), and identity and access management (IAM), rendering tailored security solutions to its clients. BxC integrates OT environments into existing IAM strategies and builds requirement-based solutions.

“We mitigate OT cybersecurity challenges in the industry to improve operations while enabling companies to accelerate the digitalisation of their production and business processes,” says Carsten Schwant, founder, and managing director of BxC Consulting. The company has a team of industry experts who bring a comprehensive understanding of IT, OT, and IAM to the table, enabling their clients to streamline their security implementation processes and avoid the pitfalls of siloed security systems.

Considering that the requirements of IT and OT teams are substantially different, BxC modifies IT security solutions in accordance with the needs of OT and finds common ground between the two disjointed departments. Such interdepartmental disparities become more apparent with the dawn of industrial IoT as more enterprises interconnect their widespread device networks to streamline their production processes.

From an identity management perspective, industrial IoT and the associated devices are a part of different workflows requiring specific security strategies, which causes a disconnect in ensuring holistic security. BxC bridges the gap between the physical hardware and logical applications by establishing comprehensive identity management, device authentication, and authorisation model that allows secure machine-to-machine communication amongst devices and the cloud. An evocative example of BxC’s capabilities for securing IoT environments is its partnership with a company in the consumer device sector.
The client in question manufactures home appliances for private households and offers additional backend services targeted at making customers’ lives better. BxC supported the client in building authentication, authorisation, and credential management protocols for their IoT ecosystem, facilitating secure exchanges of data between devices and improving the efficiency of the whole IoT network. It also assisted the client in developing a secure IoT platform, employing OpenID connect tokens, OAuth, and credential management protocols to safeguard the entire lifecycle of the connected devices. BxC also took the onus of connecting the IoT devices with consumers’ smartphones and ensuring delivery of backend services and firmware updates. For another client in the chemical industry, BxC built an OT public key infrastructure (PKI) to address various challenges associated with their OT devices by leveraging OPC UA.

Such stories are a testament to BxC Consulting’s dedication. The company functions as an extended arm of its clients’ security teams and tackles cyber-security deficiencies in an innovative, customer-centric, and solution-driven manner. With a team of passionate and seasoned experts on board, BxC Consulting is en route to translating cyber-security and business objectives into observable and valuable deliverables, helping industry leaders maximise ROI.