RS, a trading brand of RS Group plc offered a comprehensive suite of advanced solutions designed to address the key challenges faced by customers in the medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries, including cybersecurity threats. The benefits of implementing Industry 4.0 technologies like intelligent automation systems and IIoT devices in medical manufacturing facilities are abundant and include improved efficiencies, flexibility, safety, productivity, and profitability. But these technologies rely on densely populated networks that integrate information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), and the fact of the matter is that every piece of connected technology introduces another point of vulnerability to cybersecurity attacks.

RS offers a comprehensive suite of advanced solutions designed to address the key challenges faced by customers in the medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries, including cybersecurity threats. Strong supplier relationships and omnichannel capabilities provide medical manufacturers with a distinct competitive advantage and empower them to get compliant, enhance productivity, optimize efficiency, reduce downtime, ensure data integrity, and improve both time to market and quality. The RS portfolio of industrial cybersecurity infrastructure includes industrial routers, managed Ethernet switches, and protocol converters that incorporate robust security features ranging from firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), and access controls to intrusion prevention and detection, industrial protocol filtering, port security, and encryption ?

all of which is essential to an effective defense-in-depth (DiD) cybersecurity strategy. Industrial routers equipped with integrated security features like configurable firewalls, secure VPN connections, and access control lists help protect industrial networks from cybersecurity threats. For example, Phoenix Contact's FL mGuard security routers facilitate efficient and secure communication with the local network and provide a flexible and scalable solution for network infrastructure management.

The series is equipped with stateful inspection firewalls and network address translation, anti-spoofing, anti-virus, and stealth mode features. It also supports high data throughput of roughly 1,000Mb/s, which is essential for satisfying the real-time data demands of monitoring and control processes in pharmaceutical manufacturing applications, and enables easy and efficient system configuration, maintenance, and operation backed by long-term software maintenance, regular updates, and security patches. Managed switches facilitate communication between Ethernet devices and allow users to configure, manage, and monitor traffic on a local area network (LAN) and control how data travels over the network and who can access it.

They also offer security features that unmanaged switches can't. Moxa's EDS-408A Series Layer 2, eight-port, entry-level managed switches are especially designed for industrial applications like medical manufacturing. The series provides industrial-grade reliability, network redundancy, and security features based on the IEC 62443 standard and support a variety of useful management functions, including Turbo Ring, Turbo Chain, ring coupling, internet group management protocol (IGMP) snooping, IEEE 802.1Q VLAN, port-based VLAN, QoS, remote monitoring, bandwidth management, port mirroring for online debugging, and email or relay warnings. Protocol converters enable interoperability between devices or systems with incompatible communication protocols by converting one communication protocol to another.

They're essential for bringing legacy production equipment into IIoT networks and supporting predictive maintenance strategies but could introduce serious vulnerabilities into production networks if they're not equipped with integrated security features. Red Lion's DA10D and DA30D protocol conversion and data acquisition systems allow users to unlock valuable data from legacy equipment and share it with production networks and enterprise or cloud platforms. They communicate with over 300 protocols to easily convert between serial and Ethernet devices in multi-vendor environments with ease, exhibit rugged resistance to shock, vibration, and a wide range of operating temperatures, and offer optional real-time data, event, and security logging with cryptographic signature support.