Manufacturing

Protecting production integrity and intellectual property

ZEISS is an international leading technology enterprise operating in the fields of optics and optoelectronics. Known for innovation, the company has more than 7,300 research and development employees and holds more than 12,500 patents. Protecting intellectual property and production integrity are essential to the business. ZEISS also needs to ensure its cybersecurity controls are designed and operated in line with generally accepted security frameworks and relevant legal requirements.

ZEISS has thousands of industrial assets in multiple sites. Protecting them from security threats that could interrupt production or result in information leakage has become more complicated over the years. The reason: many industrial devices communicate with each other, IT systems, and cloud services to streamline operations and enhance overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Protecting the production infrastructure requires end-to-end visibility into industrial assets and communications, along with monitoring for irregularities in operational behavior.

To maintain production integrity, ZEISS wanted an industrial security solution that delivers consistent oversight across sites, strong visibility into industrial assets, continuous monitoring, and advanced detection capabilities.

Comprehensive visibility into industrial cyber risks

Today, ZEISS protects its production floor networks with Cisco Cyber Vision, in collaboration with Orange Business and Orange Cyberdefense. Cisco Cyber Vision appealed to ZEISS because it integrates OT security capabilities directly into the industrial network, reducing deployment complexity and operational overhead. In collaboration with Orange ZEISS leverage Cyber Vision to:

• ​Automatically discover and profile every OT asset. The profile includes the asset’s vulnerabilities, a map of its communications patterns, and risk scores to help prioritize action. Understanding the OT security posture of each site helps ZEISS implement cybersecurity best practices and comply with the security regulations in the countries where the company operates.
• Generate insights to help ZEISS improve network efficiency and quickly troubleshoot and resolve operational issues..
• Detect anomalous events and take the appropriate actions..

Protecting operations with adaptive OT network segmentation

Comprehensive visibility into the production environment helps ZEISS protect operations from malicious traffic and helps ZEISS to optimize and secure the different industrial network segments. The Cisco Secure Firewall completes this solution through enforcement of proposed policies.

This unified approach streamlines IT and OT collaboration, reduces manual workload, and improves protection by ensuring that only industrial devices that have a legitimate need can communicate with each other

Managing OT cyber risks at scale

Since deploying Cisco Cyber Vision, ZEISS has reduced downtime, simplified compliance, and enhanced business continuity.

​After a successful, large-scale implementation, ZEISS is now planning to implement Cyber Vision across the enterprise. A consistent security strategy across all production facilities strengthens cyber resilience and increases operational confidence.