Lifecycle Services: Prioritizing Critical Infrastructure Stability
Unfortunately, life isn’t always smooth sailing. To provide a little peace of mind, you may have purchased an insurance plan – health, life, or car insurance – to protect your family and property if problems arise.
But, do you know if you’re protected when it comes to your manufacturing facility? If you had an incident at your site, would you be able to return to operations within an acceptable timeframe?
Unexpected Threats in an Ever-changing Landscape
Many procedures, processes, updates, patches, and maintenance are critical to keep the systems in your facility running properly. However, threats evolve every day.
Uncontrollable events such as floods or electrical fires can take out a server room. Viruses and cybersecurity attacks – ransomware and malware – can lock you out or your system, leaving you to rebuild. Machines that are not properly secured on the network or running behind on their antivirus updates introduce more risk.
A situation can turn from bad to worse when you find out that your server’s last usable backup is over a year old, and there isn’t a solid recovery plan in place. This could be a result of an absence of regular maintenance or an improperly deployed system. If an electrical fire, flood, or ransomware attack takes your DCS offline, how much money are you losing due to downtime?
Constantly Fighting the Clock
When the plant is facing downtime and with constant metaphorical fires to put out, your internal team is strapped for time. When a control system technician must choose between doing an antivirus patch or dealing with an issue impacting the operator’s ability to control the process, they will likely choose to support operations.
Time constraints are only worsened by the shortage of resources in the industry. Finding specialists to consistently perform backup and regular maintenance to keep your site protected is difficult. However, these tasks are vital to any facility’s security. Don’t delay backups and regular maintenance items.
Lifecycle Services Address Day-to-Day Operations
Hargrove’s Lifecycle Services, such as backup and recovery, provide peace of mind by taking care of preventive maintenance activities that are critical to your facility’s success.
For a backup to be an effective safety net, it needs to be regularly tested to ensure its functionality, so it’s able to restore your data. A best practice is to rotate backups offsite to ensure that you are triple backed up with secure locations that have water and fire-proof safes. Validated backups get you back to operation quickly.
Through lifecycle services, you don’t have to wait until tomorrow. You can relieve staff shortages, focus on operational needs, and even create consistency by aligning multiple facilities.
Cyber Compliance with Custom Solutions
Reduce your days of downtime and sleep easy at night. Whether you have established policies and procedures, or you are just getting started, Hargrove Controls & Automation can help you understand your risks and become better protected and prepared for recovery in the event of a failure.
With our lifecycle service solution, we offer support for your day-to-day operations by checking in on your facility on a regular schedule and providing audit reports of all enrolled assets. We perform antivirus updates, back up servers, conduct regular preventive maintenance, and provide emergency support services.
Our experience in multiple industries – power, oil & gas, chemical, and pulp & paper – provides us with a broad view of industry best practices to ensure optimal solutions for your site.
To learn more about our lifecycle services, visit our Lifecycle Services page.
