Worldline has announced the successful go-live of its IIoT Solution WL Digital Doorman at the Siemens site in Congleton. This unique cyber-security platform ensures fully secured and transparent machine access management for vendors and service staff.
Industry 4.0 is more than a buzzword: today’s IIoT provides everything needed for full industrial automatisation where machines communicate with other machines in the most sophisticated way.
One of the biggest challenges in this environment is security and in particular third-party remote access security. The Siemens facility in Congleton manufactures electric motor drives producing over 1m+ per year which are used in applications including pumps, factory automation and baggage handling. With WL Digital Doorman, Siemens has implemented a unique cyber-security platform to solve this important issue at its manufacturing site in Congleton, in line with Siemens’ wider UK security policies. The service contract spans a period of 5 years and has the potential of being offered to an additional 20 Siemens locations across the UK.
Dave Leighton, Head of IT at Siemens, said: “Siemens is a leader in digital transformation and our Congleton factory is considered to be a ‘lighthouse’ facility- showcasing new technologies. In this context, secure management with full traceability and revocability of our service partners’ digital access is critical for optimum process efficiency and seamless operations. After an incredibly smooth pilot phase at Congleton, we are in production now and hope to recommend the solution to other Siemens industrial sites in the UK.”
Siemens at Congleton is the first installation of WL Digital Doorman in the UK, and is underpinned using a platform based on over 15 years of expertise and heritage in this area. The initiative was driven by the Siemens IT and Information Security functions, aiming at taking the secure remote access to their technical infrastructure to an entirely new level which resulted in the selection of WL Digital Doorman due to its flexibility in terms of access control, its logging solution and the security and bank-grade compliance. In addition, Worldline has been a long-standing partner of Siemens in many countries and has won its trust during its long-standing relationship with Siemens Healthineers in Germany.
Lisa Coleman, Managing Director at Worldline UK, said: “Siemens, like many of our industrial customers, has a natural interest in giving their suppliers and external experts remote access to their shop floor, driven by their desire to reduce down-times on their machinery. We are very proud that Worldline is not only able to boost security of the Congleton site through our state-of-the-art cybersecurity solution, but also actively support Siemens’ leading the way to industry 4.0.”
A flexible cyber-security solution for next-gen industrial sites
WL Digital Doorman enables secure connection to security-sensitive machines in an industrial environment where a raft of machine types with different protocols and maintenance partners is involved. Managing such access manually, can be expensive, risky and time-consuming for the site-owners. Therefore, WL Digital Doorman enhances the efficiency and minimises IT security efforts even in a heterogeneous machine landscape. The service allows for fast enrolment of new machines and provides full transparency and control on the remote machine actions. Leveraging Worldline’s leading expertise on highly-secured and real-time payment architecture and infrastructure, WL Digital Doorman is based on proven technology that already manages some 360.000 connected machines with 20 million remote sessions per month.
