Meertec
Threat
NotPetya: Merck $310M, FedEx $300M, Maersk $200M. Aging and ancient infrastructure. New threat surfaces and attack vectors. Stuxnet, Triton, Duqu: SCADA and PLC-targeted. Competitor advantage, IT vs OT friction.
Meertec · Lab · Field Note
Secure Factory: IT/OT Integration.
Industry 4.0, Zero Trust and combined IT/OT security principles applied to a manufacturing environment: developed for a pharmaceutical plant and rolled out to a model facility. The brief was to converge enterprise IT and plant-floor OT without giving up the isolation that keeps a production line safe.
The Model
Converging Industrial IT, one deliberate step at a time
The diagram below is the field note itself: a single page used with plant and enterprise stakeholders to agree what "secure factory" actually means before any vendor conversation starts. It reads left to right as a threat-and-opportunity case, and centre-out as the operating model that resolves it.
Why This, Why Now
The case has to work on both sides of the ledger
Plant and security stakeholders rarely start from the same brief. The diagnostic starts by making both cases explicit, in the same room, before the technical design begins.
Opportunity
Flexibility, security, evergreen platforms. Risk reduction, cost control, compliance, insurance. Utilisation and unit cost improvement. Downtime and lead time reduction. Productivity gains, plant to enterprise.
The Operating Model
Qualify, Discover, Operate, Deliver: run at enterprise and site level
Convergence happens in the centre of the model, not at either edge. Enterprise and site workstreams run the same four moves in parallel, so plant-floor reality and enterprise governance meet as designed decisions rather than after-the-fact exceptions.
1. Qualify
Enterprise case and site-level case built and agreed side by side, not sequentially.
2. Discover
Enterprise facilities and site assets catalogued against a common taxonomy.
3. Operate
Single pane of glass at enterprise level, site or process-level control retained locally.
4. Deliver
Site cloud and cloud infrastructure connected and configured under one security model.
What It Runs On
Technology and data enabled outcomes
The convergence layer is deliberately platform-agnostic; the outcomes it is built to enable are not. Smart sensing and SD-WAN carry the connectivity case, cloud and AI/IIOT carry the data case, and InfoSec runs through both rather than sitting on top as an afterthought.
- Smart Sensing and SD-WAN for site connectivity
- Cloud infrastructure: Azure and AWS
- AI, IIOT and Industry 4.0 (IR4) for data enablement
- InfoSec designed through the model, not layered on top
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