Security for Critical Infrastructure Protection

Security design cannot be an afterthought and must be an integral component of your system architecture from the ground up

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used routinely for remote monitoring and control in the delivery of essential services such as electricity, natural gas, water, waste treatment and transportation. This makes SCADA systems an integral part of a nation's critical infrastructure. Their unhindered operation is crucial to the continuity of your business, reliability of your operation and the profitability of your enterprise.

In today's integrated world of cyber systems necessitated by total enterprise integration, your SCADA system can be vulnerable to internal and external threats and malicious attempts to compromise its integrity. By isolating your system behind a firewall, or limiting its connection to the external world, you may achieve a minimum level of security, but not an absolute one.

The monarch™ architecture employs a multi-level security strategy, including recommended cyber security "best practices" by the IT industry, as well as specific requirements mandated by USA and international government and regulatory bodies. The monarch architecture is continuously subject to independent security audits by our customers and national government laboratories to validate its security integrity.

The monarch architecture employs a proactive and intelligent security shield beyond the normal IT security prescriptions. These include:

Locked-down ports
Disallowed use of certain vulnerable technologies such as JAVA, Active X, X Windows in its "safe zone of control"
Use of a very hardened user and password authentication strategy
Use of biometrics for authentication
Extensive testing and remedies for buffer overflows
Push technology to push data to a DMZ for enterprise users
Intelligent design in core control functions to disallow "out of ordinary" requests for critical device control or operation
Encrypted/unpublished source code to prevent development of system specific malicious code

The monarch system is used throughout the world in very secure operations, including military installations and very large critical electric grid operations.

From the Kennedy Space Center, to the City of Los Angeles, California, critical system operations rely heavily on the security and reliability of the monarch system.