The chemicals industry faces unique challenges when it comes to availability and resilience of their operations. There is constant pressure to run industrial operations at near 100% availability or “On Stream Time” (OST). That means that they can’t afford to have their critical industrial control systems (ICS) down for even a few minutes without putting OST at risk. Additionally, chemical processes use chemicals that if not properly maintained or released into the environment may have a safety or environmental impact. That means that their critical ICS must stay up!

To accomplish this at large companies, there are often full secondary resilience systems built out onsite, allowing for operations to continue during all but the worst disasters or attacks and during planned maintenance/downtime events.  However, at smaller or medium companies, the revenue generated isn’t large enough to motivate the construction of such a system.  Instead, the company will just eat the loss of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, budgeting those losses as an unavoidable cost.

Even during planned plant maintenance windows, the critical ICSes are often not touched, patched, or updated in fear that if the ICS fails to come back, then all of the plant operations will remain down. This has been considered an unacceptable risk to revenue and operations, but an acceptable risk to ICS hygiene and security. However, with the increased cyber threats and attacks against ICS, this can no longer be the status quo. Standard resilience and continuity approaches fall short of being able to meet the availability requirements.  Backup and recovery based systems take too long to recover and put both safety and revenue at risk. Even if the overall factory can be brought back online it may take days, weeks or worse to restart the plant and restore operations. Moreover, they do nothing to help in the case of planned maintenance/software patching on the onsite systems.  However, high availability/hyper-converged solutions are too expensive to be worth it for all but the largest factories and still fall short to prevent malicious lateral movement during a cyber attack.

Fortress provides a new revolutionary approach to Availability for your critical ICS. The Fortress platform allows for immediate resumption of operator visibility and control, even when human error or a cyber threat takes down the entire primary control system.   The secondary environment can also be patched on a separate schedule from the primary, enabling operations to continue running even during software maintenance periods. Additionally, Fortress’s design ensures that clients only need to build out enough compute to run core industrial systems during crisis events, keeping capital expenditure and O&M costs down to a fraction of the primary system.

The largest factories run continuously.  Why should smaller sites have to take regular losses?