Emerson announces enhanced perimeter defence solution

Emerson has announced it is improving perimeter security for the DeltaV distributed control system (DCS) with its NextGen Smart Firewall, a purpose-built control system firewall that it says is designed to provide easy-to-install and easy-to-maintain perimeter security for all industries. More ruggedised construction, increased bandwidth and role-based access provide users with increased performance and more granular access control.

Manufacturers need to secure their networks without complexity that would otherwise add administrative overhead to already busy operations teams. Emerson said its NextGen Smart Firewall features a user-friendly HTML5 web-based user interface, easy to understand setup menus, and pre-defined DeltaV application rules. The ease of use helps DeltaV administrators and control engineers with no security or IT expertise to create secure connections for DeltaV applications.

“A critical element of Emerson’s vision of boundless automation architecture is secure connectivity between systems in the plant and across the enterprise,” said Claudio Fayad, vice president of technology for Emerson’s process systems and solutions business. “Emerson’s NextGen Smart Firewall delivers intuitive setup and interfaces to provide plants with access to a much wider array of technologies — from control, to reliability, to sustainability and more — without the need to maintain a dedicated IT presence.”

Emerson’s NextGen Smart Firewall features include virtual private networks (VPNs) to increase flexibility and security for geographically dispersed networks, network address translation (NAT) to protect network IP schemes and conserve addresses, and more granular user roles, so that administrators have full control, engineers may add or modify application rules, and auditors have read-only access to logs.