Protecting Your Industrial Base

Learn more about our cybersecurity capabilities.

by Jenny Mangelsdorf

Whether you’re a manufacturer of tanks, electronics, or toys, protecting your intellectual property in the digital age has become increasingly challenging. Our global cybersecurity capabilities and distinction of being the first IT company invited to join the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Program, gives us a unique perspective on protecting organizations from security threats.

In the defense industry, manufacturers have built their companies with protections in place knowing thieves and spies would attempt continually to scale their walls and steal their secrets. The same has become true in other industries, such as financial services and pharmaceuticals.

Still other industries are just now feeling an escalating threat to their property. For example, companies who are not mainstream defense contractors, but provide government services as a portion of their business, utilities, collaboration networks, even toy makers are looking to tighten their cybersecurity as thieves become increasingly capable of pulling together seemingly innocent data and compiling it to create insightful information for adversaries and competitors.

“One of the things to think about is how do you take some of the lessons learned by companies who have grown up protecting their data and leverage it as a horizontal concept across industries and sectors in a way that’s applicable to your organization, and then layer vertical silos on top of that that may be industry specific, may be nation-state specific or type-of-business specific,” says David McCue, CSC’s chief information officer.

CSC has already applied that thinking to help its clients improve security and decrease risk. This insight is also why the company was asked to join the U.S. Department of Defense and other DIB Program members, who are collaborating in response to and to prevent third-party attempts to attack network systems, and use lessons learned to better manage risk to critical network infrastructures. Our experience will help the DIB Program secure the networks that key industries and national critical infrastructure depend upon.

“Our proactive approach to cybersecurity is based on a long history of serving and protecting both the private and public sector,” says McCue

Jenny Mangelsdorf is a writer for CSC’s corporate office.