Securing processes across the IIoT life cycle

In a fast-paced software-defined economy, innovation and time-to-market often take precedence over security and reliability. The latter are either added after the fact or left to users to integrate. This, however, would not suffice in the case of regulated, mission-critical industry segments. For industrial products, safety and reliability controls must be ingrained at every phase of development and must satisfy rigorous standards and regulatory compliance.

The same holds true for IIoT. For IIoT systems, trustworthiness is not something we can "bolt on" post-deployment. Every phase of the solution life cycle needs to comply with the minimum safety, resilience, and security requirements. This section analyzes various strategies to achieve this. Figure 7.1 shows the various phases and processes of a typical IIoT solution. While standards are yet to evolve to evaluate the security of these processes and policies, this section presents some practical...