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Yokogawa and McAfee partner to enhance industrial security

Yokogawa Electric Corporation and McAfee have signed a partnership agreement to offer holistic and value-added IT security solutions for industrial automation.

The partnership addresses the digital threats to industrial control systems.

In particular, the partners will collaborate to offer Yokogawa's customers seamless solutions to avoid gaps between different IT systems, across proprietary solutions and expanded communication channels (e. g. IP, wireless, and mobile) and running common operating systems and applications.

According to McAfee's recent threats report, cyber crime, hacktivism, and cyber warfare are on the rise worldwide, and are growing ever more sophisticated.

While today's process control systems can take advantage of advanced general-purpose IT to reduce costs, improve performance, enable interoperability with APC, MES, and other systems, and add other important new capabilities, the very same technologies have made today’s industrial control systems increasingly vulnerable to security intrusions – malicious or otherwise – from both within and outside the plant.

Organizations tasked with running critical infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines, chemical plants, power stations, and water treatment facilities look at holistic security systems across two disparate, yet interconnected zones, enterprise IT and industrial control systems.

McAfee solutions provide compliance measures, and real-time intelligence for changing threat environments, along with real-time visibility and centralised management through a single platform.

The combination of this expertise with Yokogawa's domain knowledge provides a more holistic approach resulting in the provision of more value-added industrial automation solutions.

This partnership addresses the issue that industrial process control systems typically have a three to five times longer lifecycle than typical commercial systems.

“Security measures for control systems are indispensable. Yokogawa is continually making stringent efforts to provide our customers optimum control system security solutions, starting with the development of highly secure instruments and systems and extending to the provision of operational support services," said Nobuaki Konishi, Vice President of Yokogawa's IA Systems Business Division (IA Platform Business Headquarters).

"This partnership will allow us to combine our technology and plant security know-how with McAfee's technology to enhance the security of our products and our line-up of security solution services covering the entire lifecycle of our customers' plants. This will include the integration of anti-virus software with industrial control systems used in the process industries."

"Businesses are looking for integrated security solutions, moving from simply securing components, to understanding and measuring the security of a business system as a whole," said Wahab Yusoff, vice president for McAfee South Asia.

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