Hundreds of heterogeneous OT assets, shrinking engineering headcount, and tightening CFATS obligations left one global chemical manufacturer with visibility it couldn't act on. Here's how Industrial Defender changed that.
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A global Fortune 500 chemical manufacturer operating in more than 90 countries faced a defining OT security challenge: visibility without the ability to act on it. Hundreds of heterogeneous assets were spread across process control networks, while engineering headcount shrank and regulatory obligations under CFATS tightened.
The company deployed the Industrial Defender OT cybersecurity platform to automate CFATS compliance, achieve full OT asset visibility, and prepare for emerging NERC CIP-015 internal network security monitoring (INSM) requirements — with no impact on operations.
Chemical manufacturing environments are among the most operationally complex in critical infrastructure. Process control systems from multiple vendors — GE, Honeywell, ABB, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Yokogawa — operate in parallel across plants, each with its own asset types, communication protocols, and configuration states.
For this company, the core problem was that technology was outpacing the team's ability to manage it. As the process control environment grew, engineering resources did not — producing a compounding set of risks. As the director of process control networks put it: “I know I have problems. I have trouble finding them.”
Replace ad-hoc, manual tracking with a reliable, continuously current inventory of every asset across heterogeneous process control networks.
Eliminate the manual staff time consumed each audit cycle by producing audit-ready compliance documentation on demand.
Gain endpoint-level visibility into device configuration state to support remote monitoring and meet emerging internal network security monitoring requirements.
After evaluating available options, the company selected Industrial Defender and validated the decision through a structured proof of concept in a lab environment before deploying into live plant systems. The POC confirmed two critical outcomes before any production commitment — no adverse impact on operations and no performance degradation on OT devices — while immediately surfacing compliance-relevant data.
Automated, continuous discovery and cataloging of all assets across process control networks — PLCs, RTUs, HMIs, historian servers, workstations, and network devices — with no manual effort.
Where passive network traffic analysis detects anomalies at the network level, Industrial Defender's active collection confirms device configuration state, software versions, firewall rules, user accounts, and running services — the depth required for INSM and CIP-015 compliance.
Pre-built report templates map directly to CFATS requirements, eliminating manual documentation preparation. Compliance status is always current, not reconstructed at audit time.
Centralized visibility into asset health and cybersecurity status from a single interface, replacing costly on-site monitoring visits with real-time dashboards.
System health monitoring surfaced performance degradation before failure — turning the security platform into an operational efficiency tool.
The company extended its deployment with Industrial Defender's managed security services for central monitoring, expanding the team's capacity without adding headcount.
The Industrial Defender platform enables organizations to strengthen cybersecurity across multiple domains.
Together, these capabilities created a unified OT cybersecurity platform — delivering continuous visibility, automated monitoring, and audit-ready compliance across the utility's entire operational environment.
Process control networks that had outgrown engineering capacity are now fully and continuously inventoried.
A unified dashboard surfaces health and performance issues across OT systems that previously went undetected until failure.
Active and passive monitoring replaced manual vulnerability tracking across complex process systems.
Compliance documentation that once consumed staff time is now generated automatically and kept continuously current.
Centralized visibility now spans all distributed plant assets, replacing fragmented, site-by-site views.
The regulatory landscape for chemical manufacturers is shifting on two fronts simultaneously: CFATS continues to demand rigorous asset visibility and security monitoring controls, while NERC CIP-015 raises the bar with internal network security monitoring (INSM) requirements that passive-only tools cannot satisfy.
