At CMIT Solutions, we work with businesses that depend on technology every day, and manufacturers have a little more at stake than whether someone can get into their email.
When an important system goes down, the problem can make its way onto the production floor pretty quickly.
Think about what’s tied to technology during a normal day. Orders, inventory, production schedules, shipping information, accounting, customer records and communication with vendors all depend on systems being available when people need them. Depending on the facility, there may also be equipment on the floor connected to other parts of the company’s IT environment.
Most days, nobody gives much thought to any of this.
Then something stops working.
It Doesn’t Take a Complete Shutdown
Not every cyber incident shuts down an entire company.
Sometimes one unavailable system is enough to cause problems.
A truck might be ready to leave, but nobody can pull up the shipping information. Employees can’t get into the software they use to process orders. An email account gets compromised. Important files are locked by ransomware.
While someone is trying to figure out what happened, everyone else is trying to work around it.
That gets difficult when there are still orders to fill, trucks coming and going, and customers waiting on deliveries.
The Problems You Don’t Notice
Some cybersecurity issues can sit unnoticed for a long time.
A former employee still has access to an account.
One computer hasn’t been updated recently.
Someone uses the same password in several places.
Backups run every night, but nobody has checked lately to see if those files can actually be restored.
None of this necessarily causes a problem on Monday morning. Everyone shows up, logs in and gets to work.
That’s exactly why these things are easy to put off.
Your Technology Changes Over Time
Most manufacturers don’t overhaul their entire IT setup at once. It changes a little here and a little there.
A computer gets replaced. New software is installed. Employees come and go. Someone starts working remotely. Another cloud service gets added. A vendor needs access to a system. An older machine stays around because it’s still doing its job.
A few years of those small changes can leave you with an IT environment that looks quite different from the one you started with.
That doesn’t mean something is wrong. It does mean it’s worth taking another look.
Here’s a useful question to ask:
If something went wrong tomorrow, which system would be the hardest for us to operate without?
Maybe it’s order processing. Maybe it’s inventory or production scheduling. For another manufacturer, it could be shipping or access to files employees use all day.
Whatever the answer is, that’s a system you probably don’t want to discover a problem with at the worst possible time.
Find the Gaps Before They Become a Bigger Problem
Nobody wants to spend money replacing equipment or changing systems that are already doing their job.
That’s not the point.
The first step is knowing what you have, what’s protected and whether there are areas that haven’t been looked at in a while.
The CMIT Solutions Custom Cybersecurity Score helps manufacturers get a clearer picture of their current cybersecurity position and identify areas that may deserve more attention.
You could find that you’re already doing a lot of things right. You could also uncover an old account, device or process that needs to be addressed.
Either way, now you know.
And it’s a much better conversation to have during a normal workday than when a shipment is waiting, employees can’t get into a system and production is starting to fall behind.
See where your business stands with the CMIT Solutions Custom Cybersecurity Score:
The best time to find a cybersecurity weakness is while your production is running normally—not when you’re trying to figure out why it stopped. Learn more about how CMIT Solutions can help protect your business, your technology, and your day-to-day operations at https://cmitfranchise.com/
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