Cybersecurity Fundamentals for Material Handling
Article from MHI Solutions Magazine
AS SUJIT MOITRA, vice president of enterprise technology at MHI member Top Hat Engineering, reflects on present‑day cybersecurity, he believes the material handling industry must look beyond traditions. In fact, he stresses that cybersecurity—within modern warehouses and material handling environments alike—extends well beyond conventional IT security.
After all, cybersecurity systems now directly control physical operations, from conveyors, to order fulfillment, to robotics. Thus, cyber risk is no longer just an “information security concern.” Now it’s an “operational safety and business continuity risk,” too.
“A strong cybersecurity program is therefore designed to protect people, physical operations and customer fulfillment outcomes, not just data,” Moitra stressed.
With this in mind, he says that a mature cybersecurity strategy should focus on six core objectives today: operational continuity, asset visibility, access control, segmentation, threat detection and resilience.
When it comes to operational continuity, Moitra advises warehouses to have incident response plans. Above all else, these plans should include manual fallback operations, such as continued picking and shipping. Ransomware and system outage scenarios, robotics and warehouse automation failures, and vendor compromise scenarios should be considered as well.
