A major multinational oil and gas company will use Owl Computing Technologies Inc.’s the OPDS-1000 to help protect oil and gas exploration equipment in the field.
The Owl OPDS data diode product line, which has long been used to defend and protect oil and gas plants and refineries, uses one-way-only data transfers to protect the plants from cyberthreats while allowing the availability of production information, alarms, events, files and historian data to end-users outside of the plant.
Protecting exploration networks and equipment represents a natural expansion of the use of data diode cybersecurity within the industry, the company said. The expansion brings cybersecurity protection out of the plant and into the field; closer to the drilling rigs, offshore platforms and pipelines that are used in the exploration and delivery of oil and gas products to the plants.
"Safety and cybersecurity concerns don't end at the edge of the plant," noted Mike Timan, director of sales at Owl. "The exploration part of this industry requires the same due diligence to ensure safe and reliable operations."
OPDS-1000 was subjected to a series of tests over a 90-day period. A range of many different protocols and data transfer types (PI historian, OPC, files, syslog messages, remote screen view) were all tested to ensure compatibility with the security architecture. In the end, the OPDS-1000 passed all of the tests, and performed beyond the requirements set forth by the company.
