Cybersecurity Technology Supplier Claroty Inks Another Large Partnership

Earlier this year I wrote about Claroty, an industrial cybersecurity platform provider, and its partnership with Rockwell Automation for network anomaly detection. Now there’s news that Schneider Electric is also partnering with Claroty to market Claroty’s real-time network monitoring and detection software to Schneider Electric’s customers through the company’s Collaborative Automation Partner Program (CAPP).

According to David Doggett, senior director cybersecurity, industry business at Schneider Electric, this partnership adds to Schneider Electric’s end-to-end cybersecurity offerings by protecting its connected products and edge control offerings within the company’s EcoStruxure architecture. EcoStruxure is Schneider Electric’s IoT-enabled, open and interoperable system architecture and platform.

Doggett noted that Schneider Electric and Claroty have conducted “rigorous testing to validate the interoperability” of Claroty with EcoStruxure. He explained that Schneider Electric is working with Claroty because “Claroty’s platform can strengthen solutions against known cyber attacks that have bypassed existing boundary protections. The technology can also alert network operators about novel attack vectors or attacks initiated by rouge insiders using existing tools and credentials,” he said.

Speaking about the connections between Claroty and two of the largest industrial automation companies, Galina Antova, co-founder of Claroty, said the relationships Claroty has with Schneider Electric and Rockwell Automation are “similar in nature in that they represent tremendous forward thinking and steps forward on the part of industrial control systems vendors in the area of cybersecurity. There are some minor nuances between the two [partnerships], but they effectively are similar.”

What stands out in terms of similarity between the two partnerships, for Antova, is “the ringing endorsement for Claroty having been selected by both vendors after an extensive review of competitors in the space,” she said.

Doggett noted that the key differentiators in favor of Schneider Electric partnering with Claroty included:

• Claroty was purpose built for industrial control systems networks by a team with a deep history in the space. It fulfills on the “do no harm” requirement by utilizing a passive, deep packet inspection approach to monitoring.
• A key characteristic of the Claroty platform is its ability to explore the deepest level of industrial network protocols without adversely impacting the system. This enables end users to safely identify anomalies while protecting complex and sensitive industrial networks.
• Claroty’s ability to understand not only the public Modbus protocol, but also the Schneider Electric programming protocols and Triconex protocols—meaning it can not only detect deviations to normal behavior and IT type anomalies in the control room, but can also alert shop floor teams about specific attempts to modify the control of the plant.