Cement is a strategic material that the world economy depends on to a large extent. The cost of production depends on energy consumption and logistics, meaning digitalization and automation is key to optimizing production and delivery.
These two facts together make such plants an interesting target for all types of adversaries.
Important Facts About Cement:
Cement is the most widely consumed commodity after water. It is the main component in the construction and production of infrastructures for building and development of residential buildings, public buildings, and water and sewage systems.
Energy expenditures that today represent 45% or more of total cement production costs.
Next, finite availability and fluctuating prices of Petroleum and the road development needed for this booming growth makes it to be increasingly used in road making.
The cost of energy and logistics contribute to more than half of the cost of manufacture. There is a very thin margin left when we manufacture and manage operations in conventional ways.
60% Cement Plants have not completed digital transformation initiatives.
2 out of 3 Users struggle to integrate data across systems.
36% Employees lack required skills for digital transformation technologies.
Supply Chain aspect is a major target for digitalisation, due to cost reduction opportunities.
Cement Digital Transformation Key facts:
60% Cement Plants have not completed digital transformation initiatives.
2 out of 3 Users struggle to integrate data across systems.
36% Employees lack required skills for digital transformation technologies[2]
Supply Chain aspect is a major target for digitalization, due to cost reduction opportunities.
Machine monitoring alerting and control is important to maintain efficiency and safety.
Integrated Digital management of production planning & customer relations.
Event logging and processing automation to enable auditing.
Each step of the process that is being digitized, is vulnerable to different types of attacks:
Machine control might be compromised and affect the product or the equipment.
Data on cement consumption and tampering with such data can disrupt sales, or be an object of a Ransomware attack.
Disruption of production planning software can affect the ability to take in orders.
Bad integration and overall protection might lead to attacks coming from the side.
Lack of training might give the attacker an entry point through an employ with enough access to any of the given systems.
Refer to our article on Cyber security in Operational Technolgies (OT) for some general guidelines on how to defend Industry 4.0.
Depending on how far you went with your digital transformation, you will have many or all of these different systems in place that might be vulnerable. Without an end-to-end cybersecurity strategy, you might create large gaps for an attacker to walk through and generate incomprehensible damage.
Comments