The International Society of Automation (ISA) — the leading professional society for automation — has published ANSI/ISA-62443-2-1-2024 (Security for Industrial Automation and Control Systems). It is the latest update to the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards, the global, consensus-based automation and control systems cybersecurity standards.

Addressing cybersecurity on an organization-wide basis can be a daunting challenge for companies that rely on industrial automation and control systems (IACS) in their manufacturing, processing and critical infrastructure operations. While no one-size-fits-all set of security practices can meet the widely varying security needs across global industries, the ANSI/ISA-62443-2-1-2024 standard addresses the complexity by setting forth requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving a security program intended to reduce IACS security risks to tolerable levels. The requirements are written to be implementation-independent, allowing asset-owners to select approaches most suitable to their needs. This update of the 2010 version provides significant technical changes, including a revision of the requirement structure into security program elements and a maturity model for evaluating requirements.

The ISA99 Standards Committee develops the standards as American National Standards, with simultaneous review and adoption by the Geneva-based International Electrotechnical Commission. The ISA99 committee draws on the input of cybersecurity experts across the globe in developing the standards, which are applicable to all industry sectors and critical infrastructure in providing a flexible and comprehensive framework to address and mitigate current and future security vulnerabilities in IACS.

“Security is a balance of risk versus cost, and each situation will be different,” says ISA99 co-chair Eric Cosman of OIT Concepts. “In some, the risk can be related to health, safety and environmental factors rather than purely economic impact — presenting the possibility of an unrecoverable consequence instead of a temporary financial setback. Thus, a predetermined set of mandatory security practices could be overly restrictive and costly — or else insufficient to address the risk. This newly updated standard provides the flexibility to reach the right level of risk versus cost for a given operation.”

To learn more about the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards, visit www.isa.org/62443standards.