North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
A few years ago, the Department of Defense required that all manufacturers working directly with or sub-contracting for them would comply to NIST 800-171 by December 31, 2017. While this was taken very seriously by large corporations that deal directly with the DoD, most small and medium sub-contractors interpreted it as yet another form of compliance they would need to meet.
The deadline has passed and we can still see many shop floors where old computers remain unpatched, where physical and cyber accesses are laxly controlled, and especially where management still thinks of NIST 800-171 as some sort of inevitable vaccination we all need to take, grudgingly. The fact China has the exact replicas of some of our planes or missiles, or that news reports frequently highlight hacks and intrusions in small and large organizations alike, seems remote.
It does not help that most of the threats are complicated to understand and impossible to see, touch or hear. For any person used to handle sheet metal, lubricant and machinery, this issue of security is still distant.
And yet, as companies embark on digital transformation programs, connecting to the web their machines or own products for better maintenance, adopting new technologies like additive printing or virtual reality, and gaining from the insight Artificial Intelligence gives for better availability, productivity and quality; physical and cyber security become super important. In fact, protecting the access and integrity of our data and our intellectual property is inherent to the very survival of our business, as domestic and international competitors can copy or damage our products much more easily than in the past.
Therefore, NIST has recommended adopting 800-171, to protect and defend both the single company’s and our nation’s Intellectual Property. The fundamental point is that security, both physical and cyber, must be considered everybody’s job at the same level as Safety and Quality. When management think of the risk to their business operations, security has to be somewhere on the list together with energy, raw materials, trade tariffs and competitor’s strategies.
When we recognize that each time we design a new component, spec a new material or revise the routings of our operations we are building the “secret sauce” of our business, then we see how protecting the security, integrity, confidentiality and availability is of fundamental importance to our business. This translates in both technology measures (firewalls, pen tests, cryptographic solutions for data communication and storage) and in organizational actions (awareness and training, behavioral monitoring, phishing tests, revisions of employment agreements and internal procedures).
Ultimately, physical and cyber security are about People, Processes and Technology: all three need to be designed, monitored and controlled to ensure we protect our physical and digital assets from theft, copy and unauthorized change.
When at FABTECH, see Rob on Nov.7 for session F68: Actionable Intelligence Manage Data to Enable Good Decisions.
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
