How OT Managed Services Are Revolutionizing Industrial Cybersecurity

[00:00:00] It's always about what are the steps and how do we improve it, and what data matters and what data is relevant at that point in time.

Intro Welcome to the Industrial Cybersecurity Insider. In each episode, we dive into the world of industrial cybersecurity. Join us as we cover the latest trends, innovations, and practical insights as we talk with leaders and practitioners across the industry. Gear up and let's get into this week's episode.

Dino Hi, I'm Dino Busak, and today

Dino I have one of my famed colleagues, Kevin Comp. Kevin, how you doing?

Kevin Good, sir. How are you today? Good. Pleasure seeing you again.

Dino Yeah, it was good seeing you last week in Chicago at Rockwell Automation Fair. what was your take on what you, saw at the fair last week?

Kevin I, I think from a. Visualization on the floor perspective, there was more booths showing [00:01:00] data and information and there was less large manufacturing or you know, the packaging plant, content, which was great. And I saw a lot of people at the booth, you know, really engaging and those ones that had content to share.

Kevin And I also saw people really, you know, engaging with each other on the floor and asking questions, which was great for the industry.

Dino For our listeners, for you that may be unfamiliar with Rockwell Automation Fair. it's kind of their Super Bowl event, that they do about, I guess they've been doing it over 30 years now.

Dino it moves around, from coast to coast, middle of the country, every third year goes back to Chicago, but, it's everything Rockwell, so all their partners, the OEMs and their asset owners attend this event. It was pretty well attended. I don't know, maybe close to 20,000 people. It might have been there for that event last week.

Kevin Yeah, it was about 20,000 from the numbers that I've heard as well.

Dino So, Couple of things. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is the, Rockwell has rebranded their network security services program, managed services, the [00:02:00] Verve platform to secure ot. Right. which, you know, one of the things that I want to talk about.

Dino In regards to managed services, which I think is becoming very prevalent on the manufacturing side. It obviously has been doing outsourcing and, and managed services for quite a while, and it's never been, um. Something that's been available to manufacturers, just, just because of the nature of their business and the machine centers and, the connectivity, non connectivity, the technology challenges and hurdles that are out there, cybersecurity challenges and hurdles that are out there, but that environment's changing and it's changing rapidly.

Dino And so what are your thoughts on, the managed services play with, manufacturing?

Kevin Well, you're seeing an interesting trend. first off, when you look at, you know, Rockwell's acquisition of Verve and then you look at others that have come out with, you know, Mitsubishi Electric now with Nazomi, and Honeywells with SC Defense, there's been this sort of pause and, what do we do with the technology?[00:03:00]

Kevin And there was always the old saying, you know, IBM or, you know, others out there where good technology goes to, you know, die, and that sort of vernacular. What we're seeing now is that they're trying to take products, rebrand them, and put a focus on it, and they're trying to now give you the data that you need to be effective.

Kevin Like we've had many years in it. But now put it into an OT lens. And while I think it's a great start, the question I always keep rolling around in my mind is, who is gonna find this data actionable? Who is going to be able to look at this and understand the context? And it's not gonna be it, and it's not gonna be just ot.

Kevin It's gonna have to be that blend. So I, I think we're finally starting to see tools that can give it to OT convergence, as an industry.

Dino Yeah, that's what I call the three-legged stool, right? It's the asset owners, the OT piece of the client side of the, the house. Then you have it, and then you have the OEMs and system [00:04:00] integrators.

Dino Right, because they play a significant role in the success of manufacturing facilities, being able to produce and operate efficiently, making goods, right? no client can do it by themselves. they buy these machine centers. They don't have the engineering staff, per se, internally, and so they rely on third parties.

Dino and so how do you. You know, work towards, an environment that's decentralized, right? a lot of varying different types of technologies being deployed within a single client, but even within the same client within their fleet of plants, right? Which is very hard for it, I think, to get their arms around.

Dino And so you have to be able to work with that OT ecosystem who have that familiarity with operations. Industrial control systems,  the infrastructure those control systems run on and how those are designed and built to deliver that data and, operate those applications. Flipping it back to the managed services side.

Dino The only way you can really pull this off is you're gonna have to bring those in. I, I've said this [00:05:00] in several of our podcasts, you know, executives on the IT side, CIOs, CISOs, for example, need to build a relationship with who those top OEMs and system integrators are. That are operating in their manufacturing facilities.

Dino That's a huge gap that we see because we work in a lot of these manufacturing facilities for decades, years. Big projects, all sorts of projects, and then also doing maintenance and support. But we don't hear or see anything from it on what they're trying to do from an OT cybersecurity perspective.

Dino Trying to drive and improving that cybersecurity posture for the client and getting direction for them, or at least having a dialogue. It just seems that's a miss in that it OT convergence conversation.

Kevin the biggest miss is if you take it from each side of the fence, it is patch now. Patch on the updates out there.

Kevin Keep everything's up to date. Have an automated service. You can track all your assets, your people, process, technology. When you flip over the wall and you go to ot, that's not really possible. the [00:06:00] other biggest challenges, and you know this, if you look at any of the point products out there, and that's a point product to me, is an individual application deployed in OT to do a functional purpose.

Kevin And so you look at any of the asset management threat and vulnerability detection tools like that, you know, as you walk around facilities, do you know five years in companies, have it deployed 15%?

Dino Yeah, well, and look at remote access and the dozens of different ways that they, prop up some type of pathway into their plan.

Dino It's not standardized. jump boxes,  cradlepoint cellular modems, internet ISPs directly into the plant. Just a bevy of different things that are found in a single site to your point, point solutions.

Kevin Yep. And, and so when you look at it, they're like unified solutions. Now you don't have three or four different mail programs out there.

Kevin You don't have three or four different Zooms or teams or anything else out there system, you know? Exactly. And so while you have specific applications, like I have a pharmaceutical company, which many people look as an IT based company, but it [00:07:00] really is basically more OT based. It's a manufacturing in many of them with, you know, strict guidance.

Kevin But all those systems have to be regulated and they all are controlled. In ot, every plant acts as its own individual, you know, cell or production facility. But even every line in that plant acts as an individual. So you're trying to take this, everybody get, in the same, direction and path of it and move it to ot and, and there's a line.

Kevin I love that, you know, it was in the TV episode mass years ago where Frank Burns said. I'm all for individuality. Individuality is great as long as we're all doing it at the same time and doing the same thing. And so that is in reality, what we're really trying to do is saying how do we take that it, you know, walled corridor that they have down to a science and bring it to ot, which is, you know, randomness at every single cell production line facility.

Dino So let's talk about some of the technologies that you're working [00:08:00] on and what you're focused on in regards to OT managed services platforms.

Kevin So one of the things is, I'm working right now consulting for several entities out there and. You know, I've had people come to me say, I need secure access 'cause of my prior life of where I came from.

Kevin But I said, you don't need secure access. You need a platform for this. And working with you and others in the industry and hearing over and over again how they need a manage platform. You know, the vision that I see out there is something that you have already. That you know, you're not looking to bolt other pieces on called DG 360.

Kevin And so this would now give that 360 degree view of the facility from a people process technology from Level Zero all the way out that you now can manage for customers who don't have the resources due to silver Tsunami who don't have the skills on site. Because you know there is not 10 engineers at every plant that know every single thing.

Kevin And that [00:09:00] really are leveraging you for your experience because of your, been there, done that, you know, abilities with, you know, Barry Waymiller.

Dino Right. and the question is, is do you know, depending on the manufacturer and the vertical they're in, some are really trying to figure it out, right?

Dino Investing, working with their consultants and their partners, but then there's a lot of 'em out there that are not, right. They've been doing what they've been doing for decades, and even though technology has seeped in to their environment, they really haven't put together a strategy on how to tie it all together.

Dino Per se. Right. In fact, to what we're the decentralized approach, you know, the plants being individual, having their own p and l, right. Working with their local sis and OEMs that they like, that they've been using for years or you know, and then their sites and not having any commonality on really trying to strengthen their cybersecurity posture or their managed services that, you know, it can be.

Dino Beneficial for removing unplanned, unscheduled downtime, improving efficiencies, getting that key data [00:10:00] up into your ERP or MES systems. that's a struggle for a lot of organizations, at least from what I've witnessed.

Kevin Yeah, and you hit the key point with profit and loss having come from companies like Case New Holland where we had multiple facilities around the globe.

Kevin It was feast or famine in the budgets where the facilities that made the, million dollar machines or you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars machines and put 'em off the line, they were viewed as revenue generators. The plant that made the 50 cent bearing that had to go into these vehicles and these, you know, off highway components, they were viewed as the, you know, you don't have a budget, you know, so if it was fixed to hole in the roof or a hole in the parking lot, or do cybersecurity or managed services, you know, which way it was going due to ocean, other things,

Dino right?

Dino You

Kevin have to treat your plant

Dino manager making that decision, you know. So I don't know much about cybersecurity, but I know of that roof leak fixed, you know.

Kevin Exactly, and so if you can offer an ecosystem [00:11:00] platform that says, look, we will take every facility that you have, we'll drop in, you know, your vision of DG 360, this unified platform of technology and services, and we can handle it all for you, then you're enriching everybody.

Kevin And then you can have that visibility everywhere. Yeah. That you can know what's going on, even at the part that makes the 50 cent, piece that plant. You know, it's gonna impact things two weeks down the line up here, when they can't get that million dollar machine off the line.

Dino Yeah. You know, and, and the technologies, is just part of the problem.

Dino I think one of the, keynote sessions I listened to at the Rockwell Automation Fair, technology's 20% of the challenge. it solves challenges and issues. 80% of it's people,

Kevin let's pause there a second. What is it about the people that you feel is the problem?

Kevin What do you feel that 80% is comprised of?

Dino it's everything that I, that we've been kind of talking about up to this point with the individuality of the organizations, you know, within the, corporate side, the plant side, [00:12:00] it, ot, sis, OEMs, you know, all kind of pulling sometimes in different directions instead of pulling together.

Dino and it varies by industry. You know, in, in the life sciences industry, some of those regulatory requirements they have just to make simple changes within the environment can take quite a long time to implement. If you can get through, it might take a year, right? in o other organizations, it's like the technology is moving faster than plants.

Dino Typically can and will, as we both know, the assets within a manufacturing facility are out there for decades, right? It's not something that, you know, every three to five years, they can't handle disruption. They wanna try to minimize that. So to them, implementing anything new is just things that disrupt their ability to operate and produce goods.

Dino Without really recognizing what can I do that isn't disruptive if I put the right people in there that know how to operate within a manufacturing facility that aren't gonna be disruptive, who understand, vulnerability management, change management, patch management, vendor management, cyber monitoring, compliance, [00:13:00] infrastructure, incident, opera threat, all of it.

Dino Right. how do you find that you don't have it in house? You don't, even if you have people that say they can do that, you only have a few and you got 50 plants in your fleet, think globally, act locally. So you gotta be able to do it at that local level, right? they're not gonna have the capital to just go and rip and replace.

Dino Ally through their environment, how they can't even do it with their control systems that have been out there for 30 years,

Kevin and so if we look at the people that were walking around AFA this year, okay. You saw a lot of the old guard, you know, the people that were there dressed in the jeans, the boots and things.

Kevin I saw one guy working my side of the street in a hard hat and a lab coat. So I gotta make sure that's addressed next year. but you saw a lot of young people there. At the booth trying to explain products. And when you tried to dive into something even, you know, two levels deep, the deer in the headlights came out.

Kevin And so I'm looking at this and saying to your point about the 80%, it's not that they can't find the able [00:14:00] bodies. I mean that's one issue. But the other side of that coin is even if they found the able bodies, they don't have the level of experience and training in all the products that you do. So you may have somebody in a plan that is great at it.

Kevin One certain product or one vendor's basically applications, but they're not knowledgeable to go, I'm gonna go from Rockwell to Yoko Gawa to Siemens, and understand how all these components work. And then be able to articulate that back to somebody in it and say, here's the problem. How do we solve it?

Kevin They're point solutions and that's, that's really what DG 360 and your organization is bringing to the table is. You have people from all walks of life that have done a myriad of things that you can be that human factor in saying The tech is the tech, but let me tell you from my experience what the tech is doing and why it matters to you.

Dino Let's talk a little bit about the uniqueness of the platform that, we've been talking about [00:15:00] for the last few months. Right. In regards to managed services, remote access and building a, a single pane of glass, I guess, for lack of a better term, with all of the, clients in this case, in manufacturing, plant locations, all the application systems, infrastructure they have in their environment.

Dino Cybersecurity tools, I. how do you paint that single pane of glass for them?

Kevin to me it's, it's a very straightforward vision. you know, and if you look at Six Sigma Lean or any of these things that I've been through, it's always about what are the steps and how do we improve it, and what data matters and what data is relevant at that point in time.

Kevin And so. When you go into a facility, you can build it basically from the slab up. Every single component in that building. You manage the project, you have the resources to do that, and then you drop in basically, you know, your, production components within that cabinet. DG 360 can now be a server that sits in that cabinet.

Kevin And as you are looking at this facility from that [00:16:00] 360 degree view, you say, what in this facility is important to me? What do I need to know from a meantime between failure, uptime, availability, ROI, safety, security, what are all these components? And it doesn't stop at cyber anymore. It's cyber physical. I saw one of the Rockwell areas where they was talking about putting a video camera now on the same screen with the data from an application.

Kevin And I said, so you see something, you have an application, but what about the user access? What about the facility access to show? Is there somebody at that system right now? And they said. we don't do that. And yet with DG 360, you can tie that cyber physical together. So now let's say you have your cabinet in the facility.

Kevin Somebody opens the door. That sensor can go off to know somebody's in the cabinet. Now you can see the changes. Now you can look at things real time and saying, should they be doing this right? This is actually an it version of what IDS started out as is I wanna see that user doing things, even if it's not bad enough to [00:17:00] trip my firewall.

Kevin To know what's going on. So you can look at all the services that are in your ecosystem and say, in one platform in your facility, I can now put this in across all of your plants. Balance that budget, balance that p and l, and give you that full view of what's important to you in a single window, right?

Kevin That we can now manage for you and notify for you. And now you're doing preventive maintenance, you're doing left of boom, as opposed to the boom has happened. And on your other side of it.

Dino Yeah, because, we've all heard about alert fatigue, right? We've witnessed that with certain technologies that go into these, manufacturing facilities.

Dino And, you know, if you get, 10,000 alerts in a day, you know, how do you really pair it down to the ones you need to really focus on? Right? and the technologies and tools and technologies can get you there. I saw some cool AI stuff at, Automation fair last week. You know, they can actually break down, you know, events that are happening within, you know, the, control systems determine which assets or machine centers aren't operating [00:18:00] optimally.

Dino And it could be due to change, or it could be due to a physical, mechanical issue that's going on with that equipment that helped speed up that process. Right. Again, tools are becoming available, And I want to be able to take very large events that happen, right? You can tie this stuff back to, ticketing systems, right?

Dino Somebody opens up the cabinet, a ticket gets generated, it gets assigned to somebody to go and evaluate. You know, why is Joe in this cabinet? There's no change management control workbook that's been been executed. So this is an event that's fallen outside of some policy. That somebody needs to go investigate, and that's what I see not happening a lot when alerts and events are unfolding in these plants because it can become so overwhelming because nobody's really structuring it, organizing it, prioritizing that data.

Kevin and I was actually happy we did not get hit with the huge AI tsunami that is permeating other conferences out there. There was samplings of it and areas where it was sprinkled in. Mm-hmm. But I didn't see people [00:19:00] waving a giant flag saying we're AI out there. To me, AI is just basically more actionable intelligence.

Kevin And to your point about the human factor, that is where we're talking about. If we put all this tech together, you have to have that human in the loop. human in the loop and human on the loop are two terms and OT that can never just be replaced by saying, I'm gonna erase those four letters and replace it with ai.

Kevin Because you have to have the context, you have to have the data, and you're seeing people take it from historians now, digital twins Analytics, but that's where Barry Waymiller and your platform really come in. You have that knowledge to know, even if I see this is what I'm seeing, what's really going on.

Dino It's like the, autonomous cars, right? Can they drive themselves? Yeah, they can, but you still require somebody's butt to be sitting in the seat behind the steering wheel right back to your human in the loop. And it's the same. And when it comes to this environment. It's the same because of [00:20:00] safety, right?

Dino Because of quality, right? Because you don't wanna destroy in, expensive equipment, you know, or product. and that's why you need to have that human in the loop versus if this, then that, then, then make this happen. you know, because of an event, somebody needs to oversee that to see if that's okay.

Dino Right? And at least in the industrial world, I, I don't know if you'll ever gonna get to the point, there might be some things where AI can be used to make decisions on changing what happens to how equipment operates, right? You do it today through control systems, but it's defined, right? It's something that's been practiced and set up and programmed to do.

Dino Right. Versus having AI going, well, I, I figured these things are happening so I can stroke that valve and fire up that pump, just based on these conditions.

Kevin Yeah. And this gets into the big realm now of smart factories. So you see facilities out there that build legos and stuff that don't have humans.

Kevin You walk through, you know, your, [00:21:00] local Costco, BJ's type place, and you have the robots that go down the aisle scanning things and stuff like that, right? But a lot of these technologies don't fit into, and you know what? Going into an existing plant and trying to retrofit. Many times it's impossible.

Kevin So as you walk the floor and you're, you know, almost weekly, it seems you're at a plant walking the floor with the facility, you realize there's areas here that this will never become a smart factory. How do you take that smart intelligence of AI and put it down to those lower level components of legacy systems?

Kevin I still deal with paper tape systems. They're not going away. I think that's where the biggest human factor comes in is you need someone to understand paper tape and it's not the kid coming out of college right now.

Dino that's a whole different beast talking about, I call it the silver tsunami, but obviously there's, large swaths of talented folks who've been working in these facilities for, decades that are starting to retire.

Dino the kids that are, are coming in today, they're smart. [00:22:00] they wanna work, but they're looking at a piece of equipment that's 30 years old, and it's like, well, how, what does it take to really maintain this, you know, and understand the PLC programming, how the infrastructure's put together, what communicates with what, what applications are being used, the safety protocols, lockout, tagout, all of those things that, most of us that have been working in the industrial environment understand, well, training a younger group to come in.

Dino You have to make that commitment, you really have to wanna make that commitment to bring 'em in. But I would say when it comes to technology in these plants, because of the complexity, I don't think there's many organizations that can do this all by themselves. They're gonna need organizations like ours where the Rockwells and some of our competitors that provide these services, to assist them.

Dino With these newer technologies coming in, newer control system technologies, networking technologies. I mean, a big term that I, that was being pushed around at automation Fair was, software defined automation. [00:23:00] Right? And everybody, you know, if you're an IT person, especially if you're a networking professional, you hear software defined network.

Dino They got a pretty good grasp of what that is and what that means. But now we're talking about software defined automation,

Kevin and this is an interesting point you bring up. You know, you say, do they have the resources? Well, the holidays are here and you know that these plants now start to run on skeleton crews are in change over time.

Dino Yeah. Or they're doing maintenance, you know, they're taking the downtime to to, to fix and clean and.

Kevin Yeah, but for others it's ramping up. And if you're looking at some of these, you know, Amazon and stuff, you know, they're smart facilities. If they were hacked and they don't have eyes on glass to get every little bit of data.

Kevin I mean even a barcode scanning system that, you know, you, the cameras are now focused off just a little bit. All of a sudden packages aren't going where they should. Things are backing up, gifts aren't gonna get there, and things like that. And what's the response? And that's why, you know, I've worked in facilities where we had a plant in India.

Kevin The [00:24:00] UPS unit tripped. The only guy that knew how to reset it was at another facility, comforting for somebody else, and he was eight hours away. So that facility's now. Having the ability to have eyes on glass with what we're talking about here, that single pane, and having that experience where now Dino, you can say, Hey, I have this person, my team in Pennsylvania that can get to this plant in Texas in less than 60 seconds through a browser securely, and retain their basically data privacy.

Kevin Everything stays within their boundary and fix the problem and get there with the proper tools. That's a lifesaver. Okay. Rockwell's not gonna build that. And Yoko Gawa is not gonna build that or whoever to basically say, we're gonna handle our things and everybody else's. That's why they rely on you guys that say you have the knowledge across the spectrum to handle that,

Dino I've been saying that a lot through our podcast. The OT ecosystem has to drive this right, in order to, to get it to the next level. It, it's a blind spot for them. You know, I still have [00:25:00] CIOs or CISOs that will flat out tell us that they want keep it and OT separated. You know, I had a CIO o tell me, I don't wanna be the SC A cop, you know?

Dino So when you run into those types of scenarios, the organization needs to recognize that so they can pivot. And start talking to their OT leadership, the people that are responsible for operations and engineering and manufacturing, to start going out into their. partner community, they're their supply chain community and, and start trying to find out what those capabilities, what those practices look like, what are their partner relationships, and start driving this narrative.

Dino It can, tag along. You want 'em to tag along, you want 'em to be involved. I always say, you want 'em on the field, you want 'em in the huddle. They just can't be the quarterback. Right? and so in that, sense, the OT organization is really gonna have to, spearhead this in my view.

Dino I'm always open to it, executive leadership that wants to get involved, but you know, their, culture and their behavior, you'll be able to determine pretty quickly whether there's something they can actually pull off. You know, do you have the resources, do you have the skills?[00:26:00]

Dino You know, when's the last time you've been to a plant? I mean, I've had IT executives, networking professionals that have never been to their manufacturing facilities or haven't been there in years, and definitely haven't been to all of 'em. Back to that think global act, local conversation. So until you start seeing that dynamic change where they're more involved and ingrained and engaged with their OT counterparts, you know, that's gonna, it's a mess.

Dino So the ot, you, you gotta pivot to your OT ecosystem and go, I'm gonna have to do this with this group in order to be successful, because that's who I rely on today to help me build my plans, build these machine centers, maintain these machine centers, you know, provide me maintenance and support. I rely on them already.

Kevin Yeah, and so to that point, everybody thinks that the things in the industry are pie in the sky. Are people talking about things, but they're not here today. The nice thing is about, with the DG 360 platform, it is here today, right? It's well established. Your customers are basically using that. It's in their service contracts and things, right?

Kevin But now [00:27:00] what we're adding to it, I can do today. We demonstrated it just walking the floor on a cell phone and saying, look, I can get you here and I can show you data. And the nice thing about it was that we didn't get one person saying, my God, this is fluffer. This isn't real. We said, do it on your phone.

Kevin And how do we do it on that device? And so now this is the point where we can provide actionable alerting real time. Mm-hmm. Right now for them to demonstrate. And it's not about, let's make this up as we go along. It's like, really, Mr. Customer, we're ready. What do you want to see? It's really cybersecurity in action and it's managed services for the OT industry in action.

Dino Yeah. It's almost like if you ask the client, and most of them would have an answer, but it's like, What problems are you having? What are you missing? What are your challenges? You know, if you could, if you could wave a magic wand. what would it look like for you to have a manufacturing facility being able to operate, with OEE numbers that are, you know, [00:28:00] in the 80 percentile, right?

Dino what would it take for you to get there? What's missing? and then sit down and, and start from there. If you, if you turn around and say, well, we, we have, what you need. We got 80% of what you need, might have 99.99% of what you need. What's holding you back?

Kevin and if you asked right now, many of them, if you could wave a magic wand and a cyber incident, what would you do?

Kevin And you gave 'em a choice of what they should do. If you had an option there, which is be on a beach somewhere, watching the sunset, having a beverage, that would be the easy answer for them because the other ones would be so hard for them to understand. It's got playbooks, IC does all the tabletops. OT does tabletops, but when things go sideways at multiple facilities, where are the resources to make that happen and how do you handle that and manage that?

Kevin And that's, that's really where the strength of your organization comes in, you know, is you can have those boots on the ground, 24 by 7, 365 to help these customers.

Dino And have the hooks in to be [00:29:00] able to, to get the data, to help make those strategic decisions, right. to help toward a possible breach that could be spreading through your manufacturing environment or change behavior, of, rogue operators that, make changes on the fly.

Dino that are disruptive, that you're not tracking. I mean, that's, you know, when we started, implementing these ot IDS platforms, and we're going back a decade now, right? I've been doing this. One of the key things that the engineering teams always glob onto that, that to them, is the a while moment, is the fact that you can track PLC changes.

Dino 'cause they know between remote access, internal, external people helping them manage and maintain their environment, their changes are being made and they're never being seen or caught because they don't have a mechanism in place to do that. But now, we put in these deep packing inspection O-T-I-D-S platforms and somebody gets out there and does it online, I-A-P-L-C.

Dino We can tell you exactly who did it, which machine they hit. Which PLC, they changed and to the point we can actually track the [00:30:00] program, you know, old program, new program and the difference between the two, you know, some of these tools are capable of doing that. it people to then their eyes would just glaze over to having that conversation.

Dino But you're talking to the in, you know, controls engineers and process people, they're like, you're kidding, right? Because they didn't have Rockwell Asset Center, they didn't have some other tool in there, some point solution to your point that was tracking their control system changes.

Kevin and the nice thing is that, you know, over the next couple weeks, now I know the holidays here, we will actually have this in your environment that people can actually go and test, drive a kick to tires and look at it real time.

Kevin Yeah. And that's one of the key things here, is having that real time to say it's here. It's not fud, it's not something that, you know, we bought a product and a year later we're trying to figure out how to still put it into our portfolio. that's where we really need to be. I'm happy, you know, we got to do AFA this year.

Kevin I know it's in a different location next year. I think this will be now my fifth. This is probably your [00:31:00] 24th. 24th, but it's a show that everybody, here's one thing I tell people about afa. You know, whether you're Rockwell or not. If you're it and you're in that region, 'cause this was in Chicago, come to the show, meet the people that are on the plant floor, understand what matters to them.

Kevin 'cause they're not gonna go out and meet you at RSA. They're not gonna go out and meet you basically at another black hat per se. Where yes, you'll get the OT security people there now, but you never get the people walking the plant floor.

Dino No, you're not gonna get the true asset owner. not at those.

Dino You, you'll see that an automation fair or Hanover Messi or other, manufacturing conferences of sorts, like water wastewater has, their own, for example, as oil and gas does too. but yeah, you're not gonna find, It people typically at those events, only in the ones where these OT cybersecurity vendors attend the [00:32:00] RSAs and the black hats, they're there.

Dino and we see, IT organizations buy these tools only to see a third of their assets. And all this money you got, you know, a hundred plants and you're seeing less than a third of all your assets. So what was the point of doing that? And you've been doing it for a while. I mean, I know clients that been using these tools for several years and we're missing, you know, again, 60, 70% of their assets weren't even in the baseline.

Dino So they're missing all those events, all those alerts, you know, that asset inventory, all the vulnerability associated with those. They're not tracking any of that stuff, and that was their whole intent on buying it.

Kevin Yeah, well, they, they, bought it. Now they don't have the resources to implement it. Now they don't have the resources to know the, who, what, when, where, why, and how, and why.

Kevin That really is driving things and they don't have a baseline. And that's,

Dino and they're not working with the plan. They, they're not working with the plan either. they're not showing them the value and the benefit of the tool. They're not working with a plant to say, Hey. I think I'm missing a bunch of assets in [00:33:00] here.

Dino Can you walk me around and show me where they are? You know, here's the ones I see, here's, you know, which ones are missing out of this list. They're not doing any of that stuff.

Kevin No, there's no prioritization. Right. Well I look forward to seeing you again soon as, since those listening today, we will have this up in your environment in the next couple weeks that they can kick the tires on everything and anything and see the true power of what DG 360 is.

Dino Alright,

Kevin well happy Thanksgiving. It's good seeing you. Happy Thanksgiving. Good seeing you again too, Dina. Thanks.

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Outro Thanks again for listening. See you next [00:34:00] time.