ICS Business Continuity

I'd like to take a moment to explain something that many facility managers and decision-makers overlook – until a crisis forces their hand.

What Is ICS Business Continuity?

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) – the DCS, and automation networks that keep power plants, utilities, and critical infrastructure running – are the nervous system of modern operations.

ICS Business Continuity means ensuring these systems remain operational, secure, and compliant, even in the face of threats such as ageing equipment, regulatory changes, or cyberattacks.

Why It Matters Right Now

Your ICS is likely under pressure from multiple directions. Equipment is ageing past its original design life. Cybersecurity threats against industrial infrastructure have intensified – 2,400 attacks occur daily globally targeting ICS systems. Regulators in the Middle East, including the National Cyber Authority, are tightening requirements under its Essential Cybersecurity Controls framework. And downtime? A single hour can cost your organisation millions.

According to recent data from Siemens, large industrial facilities lose an average of 27 hours per month to unplanned downtime—that's more than a full day of lost production, revenue, and operational credibility.

The Hidden Cost of Neglect

When ICS Business Continuity is ignored, the consequences ripple across your organisation. Legacy systems fail without warning. Spare parts become impossible to source. Compliance violations pile up. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities accumulate, creating pathways for attackers to compromise safety systems. And when a critical failure occurs, whether triggered by obsolescence, a security breach, or regulatory non-compliance, the financial and operational damage is staggering.

Consider this: a semiconductor fabrication plant lost an entire production batch worth millions due to a power fluctuation. A power utility's unplanned outage triggered cascading grid failures affecting hundreds of thousands of customers and resulting in regulatory penalties. These aren't rare edge cases – they're predictable outcomes of deferred business continuity planning.

 What Comes Next

Over the coming days, I'll walk you through seven critical pillars of a robust ICS Business Continuity strategy. Each pillar addresses a specific challenge – from the creeping obsolescence in your ageing systems to standards compliance to the architectural safeguards that prevent cyberattacks from reaching your most critical assets.

 These emails are designed to be practical, concise, and directly relevant to your role. Whether you're an engineer, plant manager, or executive, you'll see exactly how each pillar protects your operations and your bottom line.

The stakes are high. But the good news? ICS Business Continuity isn't complicated when you have the right framework.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow's email covers Obsolescence – why ageing ICS equipment poses both immediate operational and hidden financial risks, and what you need to know to prepare your systems for the future.

 Looking forward to our continued conversation.

 Best regards,
Petr Roupec
CEO, Bohemia Market

Let's talk about something your operations team probably mentions in hallway conversations but rarely brings to senior leadership: your ageing control systems.

What Is Obsolescence in ICS?

Obsolescence happens when your industrial control equipment – DCS, I/O modules, sensors – reaches the end of its manufacturer's support lifecycle. The vendor stops issuing security patches. Spare parts vanish from the supply chain. Technical support is becoming unavailable. Your system doesn't suddenly stop working, but it becomes fragile, increasingly expensive to maintain, and dangerously outdated.

Consider legacy systems like the Allen-Bradley SLC 500 or Siemens S5 – both now officially unsupported. Facilities still running these platforms face a growing list of problems: difficulty sourcing replacement components, incompatibility with modern diagnostic software, and zero protection against contemporary cyber threats.

Why Obsolescence Is a Critical Risk

Here's what makes obsolescence uniquely dangerous:

When original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) discontinue support, your facility enters a "living on borrowed time" scenario. Modern cyberattacks exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software. Your team spends more time troubleshooting legacy quirks than optimising operations. And compliance frameworks, such as the NCA Essential Cybersecurity Controls (ECC-2:2024), increasingly require that critical systems operate with current vendor support and security updates.

The operational consequence is frequent, unpredictable downtime. The financial consequence is even steeper – emergency service calls for specialised legacy expertise command premium pricing, and parts scarcity drives costs through the roof.

The Real-World Story

A heavy industrial facility discovered that a core DCS component had entered obsolescence. The vendor had stopped producing it five years earlier. When the unit failed unexpectedly (components degrade over time), the plant's maintenance team had three options:

1. find a used component on the aftermarket at triple the original price,
2. redesign and replace the entire control subsystem at enormous cost and risk, or
3. attempt a temporary workaround and hope it held.

They chose option 3. That gamble cost them 72 hours of downtime spread across three months of cascading failures. The plant lost approximately $9 million in revenue, incurred $400,000 in emergency labour and parts, faced contractual penalties to downstream customers, and watched customer trust erode as delivery commitments were missed.

All of this could have been prevented with a proactive obsolescence management strategy.

Why This Matters to Your Facility

Ageing systems breed operational unpredictability. Unplanned downtime doesn't just halt production – it breaks supply chains, triggers contractual penalties, and erodes the technical bench strength of your team (who have to focus on keeping legacy systems limping along rather than optimising modern operations).

Globally, an estimated $65 billion in industrial automation assets are reaching end-of-life. Your facility is likely part of that statistic.

How Bohemia Market's ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A comprehensive ICS Business Continuity strategy includes proactive obsolescence assessment and management. Rather than waiting for failures, you systematically inventory your assets, understand their remaining useful life, and plan phased upgrades or replacements aligned with your operational windows and budget cycles.

This transforms obsolescence from a crisis into a managed transition – keeping your systems secure, compliant, and operationally reliable.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow, we dive into Standards Compliance – why regulatory frameworks like IEC 62443 aren't just bureaucratic requirements, but essential guardrails that protect your operations and your organisation's reputation.

See you then,
Petr Roupec

A power utility in the Middle East received a regulatory audit notice. The inspectors didn't find a major breach. What they found was worse: the facility's ICS lacked documented compliance with critical security frameworks.

No explicit security requirements for asset authentication. No evidence of network segmentation. No incident response procedures. The systems worked fine operationally – but from a compliance perspective, they were a liability.

What Are ICS Standards, and Why Do They Exist?

ICS standards like IEC 62443 (the international gold standard for industrial cybersecurity) and the National Cyber Authority's Essential Cybersecurity Controls (NCA ECC-2:2024) aren't arbitrary checklists. They're frameworks built from decades of incident data, regulatory lessons, and best practices. They define how to identify and authenticate users, segment networks, monitor for threats, detect anomalies, and respond to security events.

For power sector operators, compliance with standards like NERC CIP is mandatory. For organisations handling critical infrastructure in the Middle East, compliance with NCA ECC-2:2024 and other local regulations is increasingly non-negotiable.

Why Standards Compliance Is Critical

Non-compliance carries multiple risks:

• Regulatory Penalties: Audits reveal gaps. Gaps trigger fines, mandatory remediation timelines, and, in extreme cases, the loss of operating licenses.

• Operational Risk: Standards exist because they prevent failures. A facility without documented access controls, network segmentation, or incident response procedures is operating in the dark.

• Security Blind Spots: Standards help you identify vulnerabilities before attackers do. Without them, you're relying on luck.

• Reputation & Trust: When a security incident occurs at a non-compliant facility, stakeholders, customers, and regulators question whether proper safeguards ever existed.

The Compliance Failure Story

A manufacturing facility believed its ICS was "secure enough." Operationally, it performed well. But when a regulatory audit came, inspectors found that the organisation had no documented security policies, no asset inventory, no formal access control procedures, and no incident response plan. The facility was ordered into immediate remediation mode.

The compliance project took 18 months, cost $2.3 million, and disrupted operations repeatedly as teams rewrote procedures and implemented monitoring systems. Had compliance been built into the system from the start, the cost would have been a fraction of that, and the operational disruption would have been minimal.

How Standards Connect to ICS Business Continuity

Business continuity means your systems survive threats and maintain regulatory standing. Standards provide the framework. They tell you:

• How to document and manage your assets (Asset Management)
• How to control who can access what (Access Controls)
• How to detect when something goes wrong (Monitoring & Response)
• How to prove you've done all of the above (Compliance Evidence)

How Bohemia Market ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A robust business continuity strategy includes compliance assessment and implementation. We help you understand your regulatory obligations, identify gaps against standards like IEC 62443 and NCA ECC-2:2024, and implement controls in a way that strengthens operations rather than constraining them.

Standards compliance isn't a penalty – it's a roadmap to operational resilience.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Asset Management – how to gain complete visibility and control of your ICS environment, and why most organizations are flying blind when it comes to understanding their own systems.

Talk soon,
Petr Roupec

Here's a question I ask every ICS manager: Can you tell me, right now, every device connected to your control network? Not approximately – exactly. Including firmware versions, known vulnerabilities, configuration baselines, up-to-date documentation, and remaining useful life.

Most can't. And that's a massive problem.

What Is ICS Asset Management?

ICS Asset Management means maintaining a comprehensive, accurate, continuously updated inventory of every device in your control environment – DCS, HMIs, servers, sensors, switches, firewalls. For each asset, you track model, firmware/software version, manufacturer, criticality level, patch status, known vulnerabilities, and service end-of-life date.

It sounds simple. In practice, it's often chaotic, especially in facilities with multi-vendor environments (Rockwell, Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, GE, ABB coexisting on the same network).

Why Asset Management Is Non-Negotiable

Without a unified asset inventory, you can't answer critical questions:

• Which devices are vulnerable to CVE-2024-XXXXX? (Without knowing which firmware versions you're running, you're guessing.)
• Which systems are approaching end-of-support? (Surprise obsolescence creeps up on you.)
• Which devices are safety-critical vs. support functions? (Risk prioritisation becomes impossible.)
• Where can I safely patch without disrupting operations? (You're flying blind.)
• Can I demonstrate compliance? (Auditors demand proof that you know what you're protecting.)

Fragmented asset data trapped in vendor silos (each manufacturer's own tool) creates blind spots. Security teams don't know what they're securing. Maintenance teams can't plan upgrades. Compliance teams can't prove adherence to standards.

The Asset Management Failure Story

A power generation facility operated multiple DCS systems from different vendors. Each vendor provided their own management tool. When a critical vulnerability was discovered affecting a specific firmware version, the facility's security team couldn't answer: "Do we have this vulnerability?"

They had to manually log into five different tools, search through countless devices, and contact equipment manufacturers individually. The process took 10 days. By the time they finished, the vulnerability had been actively exploited in the wild, and auditors were asking uncomfortable questions about why it took so long to respond.

A unified asset management system would have answered that question in minutes.

Why This Matters to Your ICS Business Continuity

You can't protect what you don't know you have. You can't patch what you can't see. You can't comply with standards that require documented asset tracking. And you can't plan for obsolescence without understanding your equipment's lifecycle.

Asset management is the foundation of all other ICS security and operational resilience efforts.

How Bohemia Market ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A business continuity strategy includes unified asset discovery, inventory consolidation, and continuous monitoring. Rather than operating with fragmented vendor tools, you gain a single, authoritative view of your ICS environment – enabling faster vulnerability response, smarter maintenance planning, and regulatory confidence.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Processes and Procedures – why documented, practised operational procedures are your first line of defence against chaos during incidents and outages.

See you then,
Petr Roupec

A control room operator faced an unusual alert. A critical sensor's readings had drifted beyond expected parameters. The operator had three options:

1. Manually override and investigate (risk operation continuity)
2. Shut down the subsystem immediately (guaranteed downtime)
3. Follow a documented procedure designed for exactly this scenario

The facility had invested in clear, tested procedures. The operator executed Step 1, Step 2, and Step 3 – isolated the fault, verified safe operation, and resolved the issue in 12 minutes. No downtime. No guessing. No handwringing in the control room.

Without those procedures, that same scenario could have turned into hours of confusion and operational paralysis.

What Are ICS Processes and Procedures?

Documented processes and procedures are step-by-step playbooks for how your organisation handles everything from routine maintenance to emergency responses. They define:

• Who does what, and in what sequence
• How decisions are made under pressure
• What success looks like
• How to document and verify actions taken

For ICS, procedures cover scenarios like: "A device loses communication with the control network," "Unauthorised access is detected," "A required patch becomes available," "Recovery after an unplanned shutdown," and dozens more.

Why Procedures Are Critical to Business Continuity

When an ICS incident occurs, the difference between a 20-minute containment and a 20-hour cascading failure often comes down to whether your team has practised and documented procedures to follow.

Procedures eliminate the paralysis that comes with a crisis. They ensure a consistent, rapid response. They provide evidence that your organization acts deliberately, not reactively – a critical distinction during audits and post-incident investigations.

Moreover, procedures ensure that knowledge lives in the organisation, not just in the head of one retiring engineer. When critical expertise is documented, the organisation survives turnover.

The Procedure Failure Story

A heavy industrial facility experienced an unexpected control system failure. The primary operator was on vacation. The backup operator had to figure out recovery on the fly. With no written procedure, the recovery took 36 hours. During that time, the facility lost millions in revenue and had to explain contractual delays to customers.

A year later, the facility documented comprehensive recovery procedures. When a similar incident occurred, the new operator executed the 8-step procedure perfectly. Recovery time: 45 minutes.

The procedures had been written by the primary operator, validated in tabletop exercises, and kept current. That institutional knowledge transformed a crisis into a controlled incident.

How Procedures Connect to Other Pillars

Standards (like IEC 62443) require documented procedures for access control, incident response, and recovery. Asset management feeds procedure design (you prioritise procedures for critical assets). Cybersecurity depends on procedures being in place and practised (so your team responds to alerts consistently). Obsolescence planning requires procedures for managing phased equipment transitions.

Procedures are the connective tissue of business continuity.

How Bohemia Market ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A comprehensive business continuity strategy includes procedure development, documentation, and ongoing practice. Rather than leaving operational continuity to ad-hoc improvisation, you systematically document how your organization will respond to foreseeable scenarios – and practice those responses regularly.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Asset Risks and Vulnerabilities – the specific threat landscape your ICS faces, and why understanding your exposure is essential to choosing the right protections.

Talk soon,
Petr Roupec

Every week, security researchers discover new vulnerabilities in industrial control systems. These aren't theoretical threats debated in academic papers. They're active exploits being weaponised against real facilities.

Supply chain attacks are now the #1 concern for power sector security professionals. Distributed Energy Resources are creating new attack vectors. AI-driven attacks can produce new exploits faster than patches can be deployed.

What Are Asset Risks and Vulnerabilities in ICS?

Asset risks and vulnerabilities are the specific weaknesses in your systems that attackers can exploit. They include:

• Inherited vulnerabilities from suppliers: Compromised firmware, insecure software libraries, or devices with weak default configurations can introduce threats at the moment of procurement.

• Unpatched software: Vulnerabilities are constantly discovered in ICS software. If your systems aren't receiving patches, you're accumulating exploitable gaps.

• Weak authentication: Default passwords or inadequate access controls allow unauthorised entry into critical systems.

• Lack of network segmentation: If all your devices are on the same network, a breach in one zone can spread to all zones.

• Supply chain dependencies: Third-party components, firmware, and services introduce risk vectors you don't fully control.

Why Understanding Your Vulnerabilities Is Critical

You can't defend against threats you don't recognise. Many ICS facilities operate in the dark about their actual exposure because they've never conducted a comprehensive vulnerability assessment. They assume their systems are secure because they "haven't had an incident yet."

That's not a strategy. That's relying on luck.

The Real-World Threat Story

A power generation facility believed its ICS was secure. They had firewalls. They had antivirus. They had the latest Windows release. They had perimeter monitoring.

What they didn't have was visibility into the firmware versions running across their distributed control nodes.

When a critical vulnerability was disclosed affecting those specific firmware versions, security researchers identified it immediately. The facility had to scramble to patch 47 devices across multiple control zones – a process that took weeks and required carefully choreographed maintenance windows to avoid operational disruption.

A vulnerability assessment conducted proactively would have identified this gap months earlier, allowing time for planned, orderly remediation.

The Emerging Threat Landscape

According to power sector experts:

• Supply chain attacks are the top emerging concern. Components sourced from third parties may contain hidden vulnerabilities or malicious code.
• AI-driven attacks are accelerating. AI now enables attackers to produce new exploits faster than your team can deploy patches.
• Distributed Energy Resources (renewable generation, battery storage) are expanding the attack surface as these systems integrate with grid control networks.
• Geopolitical hybrid threats are increasing, with energy infrastructure being targeted as strategic assets during tensions.

These aren't peripheral risks. They're central to how adversaries target critical infrastructure today.

How Bohemia Market's ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A robust business continuity strategy includes comprehensive vulnerability assessment, threat modelling, and risk prioritisation. You identify which assets are most exposed, which threats are most probable, and where investments in security controls will have the highest impact.

This data-driven approach means you're not chasing every vulnerability – you're focusing on the ones that actually threaten your operations.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Cybersecurity – why traditional IT security approaches fail in industrial environments, and what a purpose-built ICS cybersecurity strategy looks like.

See you tomorrow,

Petr Roupec

Most facility managers inherit their cybersecurity approach from IT departments. IT security prioritises confidentiality and focuses on preventing unauthorised access to data. That makes sense for office networks.

In an industrial control system, priorities are completely different. What matters most is availability – keeping systems running and safe. The confidentiality of a process sensor reading is less critical than ensuring the sensor continues to report accurately and that commands reach the correct device reliably.

This fundamental difference means that standard IT security solutions often fail in ICS environments.

What Is ICS Cybersecurity?

ICS cybersecurity means protecting the availability, integrity, and safety of control systems – with availability and integrity prioritised above all else. It includes:

• Network segmentation: Isolating critical control zones from general IT networks and the internet, preventing threat propagation.

• Access controls: Ensuring only authorised operators, engineers, and maintenance personnel can interact with critical systems – using authentication and role-based access.

• Monitoring and detection: Continuous surveillance of network traffic, device behaviour, and system logs to identify anomalies that may signal an intrusion or malfunction.

• Incident response procedures: Clear, practised protocols for detecting, containing, and recovering from security incidents without unnecessarily disrupting operations.

• Supply chain security: Vetting third-party components and services to prevent compromised firmware or malicious code from entering your environment.

The Cybersecurity Challenge in Industrial Environments

Here's the problem: traditional IT security often conflicts with operational continuity. Strong authentication policies that require frequent password changes can complicate operator workflows in time-critical situations. Aggressive patch deployment can require downtime that impacts production. Therefore, network isolation is a must!

This tension means that cybersecurity for ICS requires a deep understanding of operational constraints – not just security theory.

The Real-World Cybersecurity Failure

A power plant implemented standard IT-centric cybersecurity without adapting to operational requirements. The new authentication system required password changes every 30 days. Operators, facing time-critical situations, began using documented default passwords to ensure rapid access during emergencies. They communicated passwords via email. The hardened authentication policy had inadvertently created a backdoor.

A proper ICS cybersecurity approach would include built-in emergency access procedures, hardened credential management, and segmented privilege levels to enable rapid response without sacrificing security.

Why This Matters to Your Facility

Cybersecurity isn't optional. The threat landscape against ICS is real and escalating:

• 2,400 cyberattacks target ICS systems daily
• Average incident damage: $5.9 million
• 47% of successful breaches threaten human safety
• Average operational disruption: 23 days

But cybersecurity doesn't mean locking down your facility to the point where it can't operate. It means implementing smart protections that eliminate the highest-probability threats while maintaining operational flexibility.

How Bohemia Market ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A comprehensive ICS cybersecurity strategy assesses your threat landscape, identifies high-impact controls, and implements them in ways that strengthen rather than constrain operations. This includes network architecture review, access control design, monitoring system deployment, and incident response planning – all tailored to your operational environment.

What's Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow: Data Diode Architecture – the final pillar of ICS Business Continuity, and how one architectural choice can eliminate entire categories of cyber threats at the hardware level.

Final email coming tomorrow,

Petr Roupec

For decades, IT security has operated on a principle: "Build walls, monitor carefully, and respond quickly to breaches."

But industrial environments operate differently. You can't afford to discover a breach weeks after it happens. You need to stop threats at the hardware level, before they ever touch your control systems.

That's what data diodes do.

What Is Data Diode Architecture?

A data diode is a hardware device that enforces one-way data flow between networks. Data can flow in one direction only – no reverse path is possible. It's not a firewall rule that can be misconfigured or bypassed. It's a physical and electronic enforcement of unidirectional communication.

In industrial environments, this typically means data flows out of your critical control network (allowing monitoring, analytics, and reporting) while making it physically impossible for any inbound traffic – including malware, unauthorised commands, or reconnaissance – to reach your control systems.

How Data Diode Architecture Protects Your ICS

Traditional network architectures attempt to prevent breaches through defence-in-depth: firewalls, intrusion detection, and threat hunting. Data diodes take a different approach: they eliminate entire categories of attack vectors at the hardware level.

With a data diode deployed between your control network and your enterprise/monitoring network:

• Malware cannot enter: Even if your monitoring network is compromised, ransomware and malware cannot flow back into your control systems.
• Unauthorised commands cannot reach critical equipment: Attackers cannot manipulate control logic or issue invalid commands to your PLCs, HMIs, or safety systems.
• Reconnaissance is blocked: Threat actors cannot map your control network topology or understand your operational architecture.
• Data exfiltration is prevented: Time-critical operational data remains in your control network; only approved monitoring data flows out.

This architecture aligns with standards such as NIST SP 800-82, NERC CIP guidelines, and IEC 62443 as best practices for protecting safety-critical systems.

Why Data Diodes Are Becoming Mandatory

Power sector operators have learned hard lessons. Utilities are increasingly deploying data diodes to protect relay networks and control systems from grid-management networks that may be more exposed to external threats.

The reason is simple: when your entire facility depends on continuous operation, you don't take chances with architecture. You eliminate threats at the foundation.

The Data Diode Advantage Story

A power transmission operator needed to monitor remote substations without exposing control systems to potential compromise from the enterprise monitoring network. They deployed data diodes that allowed operational status data to flow out (for monitoring and analytics) while making inbound traffic physically impossible.

When a sophisticated attack targeted their enterprise monitoring network six months later, the control systems remained completely unaffected. The attackers found no path to critical infrastructure. The data diode had done its job.

Without this architecture, that same attack could have resulted in days of outages and millions in damages.

The Operational Advantage

Data diodes don't just improve security. They improve operational decision-making and compliance:

• Real-time monitoring of critical systems without risk
• Safe data transfer for predictive maintenance and analytics
• Compliance evidence for NERC CIP, IEC 62443, and NCA ECC-2:2024 requirements.

You gain the benefits of connected infrastructure without the risks.

How Bohemia Market's ICS Business Continuity Life Extension Service Helps

A comprehensive ICS Business Continuity strategy includes network architecture assessment and, where appropriate, data diode deployment. This ensures your most critical assets are protected by architectural controls that cannot be bypassed by clever attackers or software misconfiguration.

The Complete Picture

Over the past week, we've walked through seven interconnected pillars of ICS Business Continuity:

1. Obsolescence: Managing ageing equipment proactively
2. Standards Compliance: Aligning with IEC 62443, NCA ECC-2:2024, NERC CIP
3. Asset Management: Maintaining complete visibility and control
4. Processes and Procedures: Documenting and practising operational continuity
5. Asset Risks and Vulnerabilities: Understanding your threat exposure
6. Cybersecurity: Protecting availability and integrity in operational environments
7. Data Diode Architecture: Eliminating threats at the hardware level.

Together, these pillars create an ICS environment that survives threats, maintains compliance, operates reliably, and adapts to emerging risks.

Thank you for following this series. Your attention to these topics shows the leadership commitment that separates facilities that thrive from those that struggle with unexpected failures and compliance challenges.

Best regards,
Petr Roupec
CEO, Bohemia Market