By ; Nelly All

Ansaldo Energia has chosen Kaspersky as a strategic partner to secure plants, machinery and industrial supply chains on its digital transformation journey. Ansaldo Energia has begun deploying Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity in order to reinforce protection of its operational technology (OT) networks from ICS threats.

Ansaldo Energia operates in the power generation sector, developing its technologies to support modern digitisation, decarbonisation and decentralisation processes. With more than 4,000 employees, 2,500 of which are based in Italy, it is one of the main international players in the power generation sector. Kaspersky has been an Ansaldo Energia partner in IT security since 2013, protecting the company's endpoints with the most innovative technologies, including the Kaspersky EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) reactive component — now applied to over 5,000 distributed and centralised nodes.

Protecting data and equipment is becoming an increasingly wide and more strategic priority for Ansaldo Energia, especially since it started an important digital transformation process a few years ago that involved the adoption of smart devices and connected production plants. In addition, it plans to introduce innovative processes such as predictive maintenance in the near future. The ongoing convergence between the IT and OT worlds – everything that concerns production plants, made possible through IoT technologies and a business model more closely connected to the supply chain – have made the issue of information security even more complex. This approach has been addressed through the introduction of the Cyber OT Application Area in a three year scope for the Industrial R&D Plant, supporting the Lighthouse Plant of Ansaldo Energia — the first one selected by the National Technological Cluster Intelligent Factory on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development.

Ansaldo Energia has decided to face these challenges by relying on Kaspersky to build a safe model thanks to the companies’ common abilities to design intrinsically safe equipment and plants. Kaspersky promotes a cyber-immunity paradigm; with a philosophy to develop an ecosystem where everything connected through technology is protected.

Ansaldo Energia has therefore chosen to implement Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity as its OT/ICS security solution. At the end of 2019, Ansaldo Energia started to deploy KICS for Networks and KICS for Nodes in its OT networks. These products are designed specifically to protect various levels of industrial infrastructure, including SCADA, DCS, PLC, MES, engineering workstations and network connections. A distinctive feature of this solution is the implementation of a holistic approach to ensure the security of industrial enterprises and critical infrastructure. Thanks to versatile and flexible settings, the solution can be configured as needed, adapting to the requirements of the specific ICS environment. The approach involves not only protecting industrial endpoints, but also using passive monitoring technologies to identify anomalies and detect possible network intrusions.

"We chose Kaspersky as our strategic security partner because the company can not only give us the expertise to protect our industrial systems and networks, but also the ability to create together a valuable offering for other operators in our ecosystem," said Luca Manuelli, Chief Digital Officer of Ansaldo Energia.

"We have been an Ansaldo Energia strategic partner for several years and we are very proud of being chosen again to accompany the company on its complex digital transformation journey," said Morten Lehn, General Manager, Italy at Kaspersky. "The energy sector is certainly a strategic one for Kaspersky and businesses operating in the sector need a partner that is able to guarantee protection on different sides. We are ready to work with Ansaldo Energia to protect the continuity and integrity of the company's technological processes and ensure that they can achieve its desired objectives of greater efficiency and competitiveness.”