Whether public or private, water sector organizations are working smarter by expanding their use of digital technologies for sensing, controlling, monitoring, treating, analyzing and reporting. A key part of every water entity’s digital strategy is to take steps to prevent cyberattacks or accidental cyber events from impacting 24x7 operations. Cybersecurity for the water sector is paramount, since dams, drinking water and wastewater systems are deemed critical infrastructure in many jurisdictions.
Read this use case for real-world examples of how water departments and districts implemented elements the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform and realized the following benefits:
Business Benefits
- Reduce cybersecurity capital and operating costs, freeing resources to reinvest in innovation.
- Reduce water sector cybersecurity risk with automation, segmentation, and comprehensive visibility.
- Secure new digital innovations such as IoT or SaaS applications.
- Comply with evolving cybersecurity regulations for critical infrastructure
- Accelerate secure IT-OT integration to drive business value, innovation and economies of scale
Operational Benefits
- Simplify cybersecurity operations and administration with automation and native integration.
- Improve productivity in the water sector with secure, consistent, verified remote access.
- Automatically share threat intelligence and apply prevention mechanisms across network infrastructure, endpoints, even cloud environments – with no human intervention required.
Security Benefits
- Gain comprehensive visibility of and control over traffic on IT, OT, and software defined networks, including encrypted traffic.
- Limit cyber risk with Zero Trust, controlling which applications are used in which networks, and which users can access them.
- Enforce access controls and the principle of least privilege.
- Protect legacy water sector IT and OT infrastructure from cyberattacks.
