Industrial networking and OT security for manufacturing

Your plant now runs on data, but your machines were built for isolated networks. You want production dashboards, predictive maintenance, remote vendor support and ERP integration. Yet much of your floor equipment cannot be patched. Your remote sites often have no fixed line at all. Connect them without a plan, and those machines face the same threats as office laptops. One platform connects the plants and keeps OT safe.

• Separate zones. Put your PLCs, HMIs, SCADA servers, CCTV and office IT in separate firewall zones and VRFs. Traffic crosses between them only where your policy allows.
• Inspect what crosses. IPS, gateway antivirus and InstaShield IP reputation blocking run on the edge. They stop threats from the IT side or the internet before they reach OT.
• Controlled remote access. Your vendors and engineers reach a specific machine through the InstaAccess client (ZTNA, SSL VPN or IPsec VPN), not a flat VPN into the plant. You get a log of every session.
• Reach devices behind the router. SD-LAN lets your authorised engineers reach equipment behind an Instaroute router without exposing it to the internet.

When a PLC faults on the night shift, your engineer should not need a site visit to diagnose it. Instaroute routers connect directly to your field equipment. A built-in serial DTU carries RS232/RS485 devices over TCP or UDP, so your legacy equipment reaches a modern host unchanged. The Modbus gateway handles Modbus RTU, ASCII and TCP. DNP3 and IEC 60870-5-101/104 serve your meters, RTUs and PLCs. The MQTT publisher sends machine data to your platform or cloud. Digital inputs and outputs can trigger events. Your remote engineers can reach PLCs for diagnostics without travelling to site.

A large plant and a small pumping station need different edges, not different policies. Large plants connect over the Nexapp Controller's SD-WAN. You get application-aware steering, QoS with five traffic classes and SLA-based failover across MPLS, ILL, broadband and cellular. Smaller sites, warehouses, pumping stations and remote assets connect over Instaroute 4G or 5G routers. SDWAN Lite 2.0 manages them, up to 100,000 devices per deployment. You pay a flat per-device price with no data metering. Both run on NexappOS, so your policy and encryption stay consistent across the estate.

IEC 62443 is the international series of standards for industrial automation and control system security. It covers both how products are developed and what security capabilities components must have. Nexapp products hold IEC 62443 certification. This supports your own IEC 62443-based zone-and-conduit design. Our zone firewalls and VPN tunnels act as the controlled conduits between your OT zones and the enterprise.

You probably run one vendor for the office and another for the plant floor. Each has its own console and support contract. With us, you get both. SD-WAN and NGFW cover plant and office, Instaroute routers cover the field, and SSE is ready for the move to SASE. A 24×7 NOC in Pune and field teams across India support you. One SLA covers hardware, firmware and platform.

Your equipment may run for a decade, and its data may stay sensitive for as long. That data includes designs, process parameters and energy data. Every tunnel uses hybrid post-quantum key exchange (ML-KEM, NIST FIPS 203). You also get ML-DSA authentication and post-quantum-signed firmware and configuration. Together they protect you against harvest-now, decrypt-later, and against tampered firmware in the field.

1. Map. Inventory your OT and IT assets, protocols and remote-access needs. Define zones.
2. Design. Choose the edge for each site (SD-WAN appliance, DIN-rail router, outdoor 5G) and the transport mix.
3. Deploy. Zero-touch provisioning brings your devices online with their configuration.
4. Secure. Apply zone policy, IPS and remote-access rules centrally.
5. Operate. You get alarms, reports and signed firmware updates, with canary rollout and rollback.