Rockwell and Cisco partner to enhance industrial IoT security

In a bid to improve plant-floor and enterprise data security, technology giant Cisco and Rockwell Automation announced a collaboration to develop a deep-packet-inspection (DPI) technology for use in industrial security appliances. The effort aims to develop an industrial firewall with DPI technology to extend visibility down to the plant floor, said a Rockwell release. While IT managers previously had this visibility, the Cisco and Rockwell offering allows both plant and IT managers to more securely manage network traffic in a Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) architecture in which a plant-floor application can instruct a firewall to deny firmware downloads to a controller.