Back-ups and Patch Management

Preventative strategies for optimum performance

Effective patch management and backing up of systems is an important element of not only operational resilience but also a comprehensive security program for industrial control systems (ICS).

Backups

A well-thought-out backup plan for the entire control system is recommended. A thorough backup plan considers the following factors.

What to backup - select the type of data to back up and specify the data items
Where to backup - specify a path to the location where the backup archive will be stored and name.
How to backup - specify when and how often to back up; define how long to keep the created backup archives; set up the schedule for the archive cleanup procedure; use well-known or create a custom backup scheme

We can help to perform a backups (and verification where applicable) of your Servers,

Workstations, PLCs, HMI Panels, Drives, Network Switches etc. and store the associated programs and configuration files in an agreed repository.

We recommend having multiple backup repositories to mitigate the risk that your repository is corrupt. If your security policies permit backups to be held off-site then we are also able to include for this within our service.

Patching

Maintaining your hardware and software through regular updates/patching protects you from cyber security threats and provides you with the very latest features and bug-fixes. It also helps to mitigate some of the issues associated with obsolescence of aging equipment.

However, in complex systems the application of updates/patches may introduce new faults or have undesired consequences.

Capula are able to offer Update/Patching Services to help you reap the benefits whilst mitigating the risks:-

We can actively monitor and report on the updates/patches that are available for your systems within your support agreement.
We are also able to review updates to determine if there are any known compatibility issues prior to them being deployed within your systems.
We can also update/patch your systems at an agreed interval to ensure systems are safely maintained at the latest recommended versions. Ideally, updates/patches would be applied and tested in a sandbox environment before being deployed into a live/production environment but this is not always possible.