Emerson expands Dragos global agreement, validates platform

Emerson has expanded its global agreement with Dragos, which includes validating Dragos Platform within its DeltaVTM distributed control system (DCS).

Emerson validating this platform means organisations will have significantly improved ICS/OT cybersecurity.

The expanded agreement builds on the initial partnership between Dragos and Emerson to protect industrial control systems and operational technologies for power producers and water utilities.

It now includes organisations across dozens of industries such as oil and gas, chemical, petrochemical, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper and metals and mining.

The Dragos OT Security Platform focuses on reducing cyber risk to industrial environments and offers visibility into assets and vulnerabilities, detects cyber threats to industrial systems and allows efficient response through forensic investigation and OT-specific playbooks.

Dragos is also incorporating DeltaV DCS platform-specific capabilities into Dragos Platform, including protocol dissectors, asset characterisations, threat behaviour analytics, and investigation playbooks to broaden Emerson's cybersecurity assessment capabilities and enhance threat detection and response for process industries.

"Emerson has been a fantastic collaborator, and we are proud of the work we have done together to help power producers and water utilities securely run their operations," Dragos business development vice president Matt Cowell says.

"By growing our agreement and bringing industrial cybersecurity to an even wider group of industries, we are able to reach and protect a wider array of organisations in the process industry sector, many of whom are just embarking on the path of digital transformation and have immediate needs to reduce risk as they expand connectivity.

Customer benefits of the Dragos and Emerson's agreement expansion include:

• Improved threat detection and response across the entire industrial OT network.
   
• Greatly enhanced visibility into the OT environment allowing industrial organisations to monitor assets, track and mitigate vulnerabilities, and leverage traffic monitoring information to investigate issues and incidents.
   
• Fast, efficient and effective threat detection, response, and mitigation to help maintain safety and uptime as a result of continuously updated content packs hyper-focused on ICS networks for DeltaV DCS-specific and other vendors' hardware.
   
• A full range of OT cybersecurity services is available throughout Emerson's global services network for process industries.
   
• The collective experience and intelligence of Dragos and Emerson to enhance education for defenders, including whitepapers, webinars and other resources.

"We recognise the increasing risk from the growing number of both targeted and untargeted cyber threats against industrial operations and are committed to continuously strengthening our OT cybersecurity capabilities with best-in-class technology that allows us to proactively address the evolving threat environment head-on," Emerson process systems and software business cybersecurity business director Alexandre Peixoto says.

"Expanding our agreement with Dragos allows us to offer market-leading ICS/OT-specific cybersecurity to a large, diverse section of our customer base and provide the processing and manufacturing community with the protection they need to safely and efficiently run their operations.

Emerson and Dragos previously signed a global agreement to integrate threat detection technology from the Dragos Platform into Emerson's Ovation automation platform and Power and Water Cybersecurity Suite.