Inventorying Transient & Distributed Rail Assets

Using what we have learned in oil and gas, mining datasets, and aviation with e-Enabled aircraft – we are going to take you on an educational tour on how to tackle inventories of connected (but potentially not always on) distributed assets on low bandwidth, critical, and often non-IP networks.

While many vendors have suggested to Operations folk that passive packet monitoring solutions for anomaly detection & inventorying will do no harm, it has done harm by not being the right investment due to the differences in industrial control and automation systems, its inaccuracy, and also its inability to enable asset owners to take action. Most of the necessary data is not always flowing, or identifiable information only occurs under specific conditions, and a different active approach is required for real cyber security improvement while gathering “water from the data well”.

In an effort to assist asset owners moving to digitalize for efficiency discovery – getting ahead on asset management before it strays out of control is critical to the long-term security of an organization, and its operations safety and reliability.

This session will:

• Discuss the need for detailed asset inventories as a basis for security & data historian/optimization purposes
• Show how discovery can be done successfully while enabling security & optimization data retrieval
• Explain several pitfalls and challenges when moving to a highly connected environment without adequate preparedness
• Illustrate a potential approach to success to identify assets, extract data, secure them, and enhance overall function
• Share a few opportunities to use extracted data as a multiplier for other investments while securing them