text: Virtualizing Industrial Control Application: Not without security - Electronics Maker
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  Virtualizing Industrial Control Application: Not without security
  Virtualization brings along with it a wide range of benefits for industrial control applications without compromising on the level of security delivered by the traditional physical infrastructure, provided that the right software platform is selected. Moreover, virtualization enhances the existing security at system level by enabling dynamic updates that are equipped to respond to the emerging threats.
  Industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy and smart buildings have infinite instances where companies rely on industrial control systems that were installed twenty or thirty years ago. However, these legacy systems present major challenges to the business, including increasing operational expenses due to high maintenance and replacement costs; a dwindling pool of skilled technicians; limited flexibility resulting from sole-sourced solutions with proprietary programming models; slow product lifecycles out of step with fast-moving IT and mobile technologies; outdated box-level security features with no provision for end-to-end threat protection or dynamic updates.
  In order to address to these challenges, companies are looking at leveraging virtualization to cut down the operational cost through the deployment of secure, robust, flexible software based solutions as an alternative to the fixed function, legacy hardware.
  One of the key benefits of virtualization in industrial control applications is that it enables the software-based control functions to run on generic server platforms located on premise, either in a stand-alone configuration or a mini data center. In either case, customers expect to be able to deploy industry-standard servers that may not include hardware. Virtualization also allows Virtual Machines (VMs) to be dynamically migrated from one physical server to another, whether to eliminate downtime during software updates, to recover automatically from platform failures or to adjust resource utilization in response to changing workloads. Binding a VM to a physical TPM severely limits the scenarios under which dynamic VM migration is possible.
  For industrial control applications, it is critical to ensure an end-to-end boot process that is fully secure. Consumers are looking for solutions that enable them to achieve the full range of benefits from virtualized industrial control functions without compromising on the security that is an absolute requirement for critical infrastructure.