With hundreds of heterogeneous OT assets, finite engineering headcount, and tightening CFATS obligations, this Fortune 500 chemical manufacturer needed OT asset visibility it could actually act on.
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With Industrial Defender, we're able to improve operational efficiency, better protect critical process control systems against threats, and meet our external compliance obligations.
When the director of process control networks at a global Fortune 500 chemical company looked at his team's ability to manage their growing OT environment, his honest assessment was blunt: “I know I have problems. I have trouble finding them.”
With hundreds of heterogeneous OT assets distributed across process control networks, finite engineering headcount, and tightening regulatory obligations under CFATS, the status quo was unsustainable. Industrial Defender changed that.
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 their process control environment grew, engineering resources did not.
Establish a current, accurate inventory of OT assets across process control networks.
Identify health and performance issues in PLCs, RTUs, and HMIs before they cause downtime.
Reduce the manual CFATS documentation burden required per audit cycle.
After evaluating available options, the company selected Industrial Defender to address their OT security and compliance requirements. The decision was validated through a structured proof of concept (POC) conducted in a lab environment before deployment into live plant systems. Industrial Defender was deployed in a lab, then configured to integrate with field systems, operator stations, and critical process control assets.
Process control systems remained fully available throughout the POC.
OT devices experienced no performance degradation from active data collection.
The POC confirmed the platform's ability to immediately surface compliance-relevant data, giving the team confidence that full deployment would meet their operational and regulatory requirements from day one.
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.
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.
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 replaces costly on-site monitoring visits, and system health monitoring surfaces performance degradation before failure.
The company chose to extend their deployment with Industrial Defender's managed security services for central monitoring, extending their team's capacity without adding headcount.
The regulatory landscape for chemical manufacturers is shifting on two fronts simultaneously. CFATS continues to demand rigorous asset visibility and security monitoring controls. Passive-only monitoring tools were designed for a different era: they cannot communicate with OT devices to confirm configuration state, they cannot surface the endpoint-level evidence INSM requires, and they cannot automate the compliance reporting workflow that frees engineering teams to focus on operations. Industrial Defender has been safely collecting, monitoring, and managing OT asset data in the largest critical infrastructure deployments in North America since 2006.
