Four Benefits of Using Radiflow CIARA for OT Risk Management

Planning an effective OT cybersecurity strategy to safeguard critical infrastructure or an industrial control system (ICS) can be a daunting task. You can’t know if your plan is truly effective until you are under attack.  Obviously, there’s no way to predict when a certain threat will visit your OT network, so how can you know in advance how resilient you are?

Another problem that every operation confronts is the almighty security budget. It’s limited. There’s never enough money to fully protect the operation from each and every known threat, let alone all the new ones. So, you have to prioritize. But if you get it wrong, the effectiveness of your security investment will vanish as fast as exfiltrated data. 

Accurate Risk Assessment and Management

Radiflow’s CIARA OT Risk Assessment and Management platform addresses those problems. It delivers an accurate analysis of the network’s risk exposure, automatically accounting for the real-world impact on business processes and the probability of a materialized threat.

Here are four helpful ways that CIARA helps you know the cyber-risk of your network and instructs you on how to optimize your cyber spend for maximum ROI.

1. Risk assessments without guesswork

With CIARA, OT security budgeting and planning no longer involve “eyeballing” threats and making decisions based on limited information and guesstimations. Instead, you are presented with informative, easy-to-understand reports along with key performance indicators (KPIs) for risk as well as for threat and control levels. CIARA delivers a comprehensive, custom hardening plan (ISA/IEC 62443-compliant), prioritized by each mitigation control’s contribution to your risk-management goals. You know where to spend your precious cybersecurity budget for maximum effect. 

2. Continuous risk management

The OT threat landscape is always changing. Your operation is subject to newly discovered malware, breach tactics, and propagation of threats from sector to sector. Even the device mix affects security – every new device brings with it security baggage in the form of device- and vendor-specific threats. You have to stay on top of the dynamic security environment by continuously monitoring and assessing risk.  CIARA changes the risk-management process from a snapshot to a video, enabling you to see the impact as you progress. CIARA makes it easy to perform quarterly or even monthly evaluations of OT security, enabling you to re-prioritize plans for deployment of security controls that adapt to the changing threat landscape. 

3. Security posture compared to peer organizations

It’s no surprise that organizations that operate in the same industry and location share much of the same threat landscape. Employing Radiflow’s extensive in-house and third-party research data for industry- and region-based OT security practices, CIARA’s benchmarking tool tells you where your OT security stands against peer ICS organizations in the same region and industry.  In addition, CIARA analyzes the effects of newly introduced OT security apps as well as the procedures and protocols commonly used in the same industry/region. These insights guide you toward acquiring mitigation tools and adopting practices that are relevant to your organization’s specific environment. 

4. Your network, your budget, your optimization preferences

Beyond assessing risk and generating an OT security plan based on prioritized threats and threat-mitigation controls for your specific network, CIARA provides capabilities for security-project customization. 

• • • • Budgeting over time. You can assign cost figures to mitigation measures and plan their implementation quarter by quarter, predicting your compliance level with relevant standards (IEC 62443, NIST CSF).
      • Preferences. CIARA’s customizable optimizations enable you to set additional criteria to match your organization’s current place on the journey to compliance with IEC 62443, NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), or industry best practices. You can prioritize the protection of high-impact business units and set your organization’s risk-aversion level.  

Take a Look at CIARA

It’s easy to see CIARA risk assessment and management in action. Contact us to find out how it will perform risk-management wonders in your environment.