Cloud Visibility:: Industrial

CASE STUDY
Cloud Visibility: Industrial

Providing Visibility to Your Industrial SCADA Virtualization Environment
Industrial networks are looking to virtualize their environments to reduce hardware, infrastructure and
facilitation costs as well as enabling better SCADA software integration into the existing virtualized IT
environment.
With the growth in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) deployments, a computer system
for gathering and analyzing real-time data, virtualization has provided challenges to gaining 100%
visibility of virtualized SCADA network traffic.
Challenge: Many of these challenges are tied to hardware and software infrastructure complexity.
Current network designs deploy a multitude of servers, each server with a dedicated task, like one
handling all Manufacturing Execution System (MES) data, one handling the Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP), and another server for the SCADA platform. All of this integrated to the IT infrastructure, such
as WSUS server, Domain Controller (DC) server or Active Directory (AD) server, who each run different
operating systems, like MES runs on Windows Server 2003, ERP runs on Windows Server 2008 and the
SCADA solution runs on Linux.
If one of these servers were to go down, a failure in the power supply or CPU, leads to a cascading effect
of the applications going down, leading to data loss and loss of functionality of the IT infrastructure.
Goal: The concept with SCADA Virtualization would be to consolidate all of these servers and applications
to run on one physical server, through a virtual environment. A comprehensive network virtualization
strategy includes network visibility, network infrastructure, network redundancy, and disaster recovery.
All with the goal of providing network continuity, process availability, while improving plant efficiency and
reducing network complexity.
In these environments, the availability of data within industrial automation is critical. Optimized security
and performance starts with 100% visibility into network traffic including both virtual and physical
environments. And visibility starts with the packet. A network visibility fabric that includes network TAPs
and packet brokers, provides complete network visibility and link optimization, can reduce network
complexity, enable easier infrastructure upgrades, facilitate traffic growth and improve the effectiveness
of SCADA tool performance.
Network TAPs + Packet Brokers + Inline Edge + Cloud Visibility | GarlandTechnology.com | +1 (716) 242.8500 | sales@garlandtechnology.com
©2020 Garland Technology LLC. All Rights Reserved

Virtualized SCADA Substation Deployment
Solution: Migrating a utility substation design to a virtualized SCADA deployment offers many benefits
including hardware server consolidation, high availability, migration capabilities, and easier backup and
restore processes. However virtualizing a SCADA deployment leads to many challenges including having to
reconfigure resource allocation, conflicts with network OS activities and reduced visibility into the substation.
Deploying Garland Prisms traffic mirroring with the substation server hypervisors, eliminates this data blind
spot, providing the SCADA platform and any other connected system access and visibility. Integrating this
virtual packet traffic with physical layer network TAPs and packet brokers provides a complete end-to-end
visibility fabric.
Benefits:
• Single-sensor for Public/Private cloud
• Private controller for air-gapped architectures
• Supports containers, Linux, and Windows
Server
• TLS decryption including 1.3 and predecessors
• Integrates with Garland’s physical network
TAPs and packet brokers
Substation Firewall Optimization

Challenge: Another common utility challenge is firewall optimization within a substation. Updating firewall
firmware can mean eliminating access to the substation during the firewall update cycle causing blind spots.
Solution: Deploying an external Bypass TAP in substation locations, offer the unique ability to implement
inline lifecycle management, sandboxing firewall deployments, to easily taking out-of-band for updates,
installing patches, performing maintenance or troubleshooting to optimize and validate before pushing
back inline, without impacting the availability of the network. Both the bypass TAP and firewall can be
remotely managed to automate the entire process.
Benefits:
• Scripting support or cloud orchestration
• Maintains control center visibility
• Remote accessibility
• Failover on loss of power
• Ease of configuration
With the constant change, all industrial processes are subject to, companies are taking the leap virtualizing
SCADA environments with the ultimate goal to achieve reduced hardware, infrastructure and facilitation costs.
Garland Prism’s cloud visibility with TLS decryption addresses this challenge with the industry’s most flexi-
ble and feature-rich cloud traffic mirror providing complete visibility into tough to reach encrypted virtual
traffic. Looking to learn how to provide visibility into your environment? Contact us for a free Design-IT
session with our engineer team today!
Network TAPs + Packet Brokers + Inline Edge + Cloud Visibility | GarlandTechnology.com | +1 (716) 242.8500 | sales@garlandtechnology.com
©2020 Garland Technology LLC. All Rights Reserved 072220

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CASE STUDY

Cloud Visibility: Industrial

©2020 Garland Technology LLC. All Rights Reserved

Substation Firewall Optimization

©2020 Garland Technology LLC. All Rights Reserved 072220

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