Retrofitting: FP securely combines decentralised industrial facilities with the IoT

Berlin, 26 March 2019 – The risk of falling victim to a cyber attack is great: according to a recent study by the BSI*, around two thirds of companies and institutions in Germany were affected by cyber attacks in 2016 and 2017. A quarter of these attacks resulted in production and operations downtime, which can result in high costs for the companies affected. At the same time, the Internet of Things (IoT) is finding its way into increasing numbers of industrial facilities. These are often not designed for the security requirements of the new IoT technologies. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, cyber attacks were recently declared one of the five biggest problems for our societies. FP, expert in the secure mailing business and secure digital communication processes, has developed a secure solution that companies can use to protect themselves from this threat.

Secure retrofit solution for industrial control systems

Retrofitting is the process of updating and modernising existing systems. FP develops a secure integrated solution together with Juconn, which securely links even decentralised systems or machinery with old control systems to the IoT, allowing a virtual overview of all control systems. For the first time at this year’s Hannover Messe, from 1 to 5 April 2019, FP and Juconn will be jointly presenting a use case for a retrofit solution for condition monitoring with predictive maintenance. Condition monitoring is used to track the operating states of equipment and system. This is a basic requirement for predictive maintenance.

Predictive maintenance involves the forecasting of operating states, and timely servicing of equipment based on these forecasts.

The IoT Gateway from FP collects the data from control systems and external stations, and transmits these securely to the IoT cloud platform operated by Juconn. This analyses the data and visualises them in a dashboard, which the customers can view via computer, tablet or smartphone. It thus becomes uncomplicated for customers to monitor and analyse all the data from their control systems at any time.

It is estimated that the market for IoT security technology will grow to a volume of 30 billion US dollars by 2030. FP is excellently equipped for this, because security is the brand essence of the company: FP has decades of experience in security technology. Together with Juconn, the Group is developing the most secure and simultaneously convenient end-to-end IoT solution currently available on the market. 

*Federal Office for Information Security (BSI): “The State of IT Security in Germany in 2018”, published 11 October 2018.