PrivX™ OT Case Study - Industrial Crane Manufacturer
A Marine Vessel Operator Secures Remote Access, Diagnostics and IoT Data Collection
Industrial Crane Manufacturer Secures and Simplifies On-site and Off-site Port Maintenance
Customer
The customer is a global industrial crane manufacturer and services provider with operations in major ports for loading and unloading containers using automation.
Customer challenge - complex access management, incomplete control
The customer had segmented its networks and was running a private port network with basic level access control to the 5G port network itself. However, with this set up:- There was a general lack of oversight of remote access to ports (who did what, when and with what rights)
- The customer was not able to limit access even per maritime facility, meaning that a technician operating in Asia could access ports in Europe, and vice versa.
- Once a technician was inside the network, they had access to many cranes.
- Restricting privileges to the minimum for the task at hand was hard to configure or limited.
- Internal employee and third-party access tracking and identification was limited.
- The customer had multiple point solutions in use for access.
- Access credentials were insufficiently managed.
PrivX OT deployment in the customer environment
The customer decided to radically simplify their access management environment by replacing the point solution approach they had implemented earlier. Instead of using VPN tunnels per access, they centralized their management under one Digital Gatekeeper, PrivX OT.
- PrivX was integrated with multiple IAMs and ADs to always link an ID to a role for each session.
- Both employees and vendor technicians log in to a VPN service, opening access to a VPN gateways zone behind a firewall.
- After this phase, PrivX restrict access to a minimum needed to get the job done.
- PrivX offers multiple authentication methods, including:
- AD/LDAP user & password
- Local user & password
- OpenID Connect
- MFA (TOTP & Biometric)
- Passkeys / FIDO2
- TLS client certificate
- SSH public key
- External JSON web token
- PrivX Authorizer
- After authentication, PrivX automatically maps the identity to the right role for access.
- PrivX stores and rotates the credentials needed for access or enables passwordless access. Credentials are vaulted and rotated after use, or in the case of passwordless access, the user never even sees or handles any credentials.
- The user (maintenance engineer, vendor engineer, ship technician, etc.) only sees a list of available targets based on the role – and nothing else.
- The user selects the target from the list and gets access to it. The target can be a single application, gauge, or crane operation module, depending on the task at hand. The actions the user is allowed to perform can be restricted as necessary, allowing options ranging from read-only or to full access.
- Through AWS Direct Connect, the traffic is routed to a cloud-hosted PrivX instance best suited for the connection, based on the load and location.
- All sessions produce an audit trail. For the most important connections, session recording or live monitoring is available. It also possible to require external authorization by the site admin for critical sessions.
- After the session is over, offboarding is automatic. Every session is verified each time it is made, in a just-in-time (JIT) fashion to align with the Zero Trust security framework.
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PrivX OT is the centralized and streamlined access gateway for all the cranes at port. Any employee or third party gets access from any location to an individual crane in a uniform, controlled way.
PrivX PAM technology comes in different flavors
PAM for industrial automation and manufacturing businesses
PrivX OT Edition
Go beyond mere secure remote access (SRA) with a full-scale OT access management solution.
PrivX OT provides on- and off-site secure access to modern IT/OT targets in hybrid environments.
PAM for managed hosts and multi-tenant environments
PrivX MSP Edition
Grant secure access for multiple roles to multi-tenant customer environments and managed hosts.
Demonstrate proper access governance to your customers with audit trails of all activities.
passwordless and keyless access
Zero Trust, Just-in-Time Access Management
Manage encryption keys and passwords from a single pane of glass. Start small or go to enterprise scale.
Then, radically reduce the number of encryption keys and passwords to manage with credential-less authentication.
