You may be well aware of the cyberattacks on retailers and banks, but did you know malware encounters are on the rise in the energy and oil & gas sectors? The findings of the Cisco Annual Security Report may shock you. The 2012 breach of Saudi Aramco's network disabled thousands of computers, and the Turkish pipeline explosion a few years before were some of the first acknowledged cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.

To protect themselves from attacks, oil and gas companies are turning to Cisco. Sometimes they adopt a managed service, as Royal Dutch Shell did when they adopted the Cisco Secure Ops Solution. Other times they supplement their critical network with key security and safety layers.

Earlier this year Kuwait Oil Company decided to upgrade their critical network infrastructure.

Abdulsalam Al-Matrouk, Senior Engineer of Telecommunications at Kuwait Oil Co., explains why:

"Cyber-attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated and discreet and are driven by financial or political gain. The number of devices and applications accessing our network both inside and outside our firewall has been steadily growing, thereby creating more attack vectors for hackers to exploit. Cisco's broad set of solutions, covering the broadest set of attack vectors and leveraging both global and local intelligence, met our company needs perfectly."

Kuwait Oil is seeing massive benefits:

• Knowing who's on their network with the solution's identification of every user and device.
• Expanding their network reach fast and safely with easy on-boarding and securing of all devices.
• Controlling who accesses their network, where they access it, and on what devices with centralized policy management.

Since the industry has many contractors and third parties working together, the Identify Services Engine makes worker and guest access highly secure. It also allows workers to bring their own devices (BYOD) and enforces company usage policies.

Finally, this all has to be easy to use. And it is! The Identity Services Engine offers an easy onboarding experience to make a worker's personal devices secure and grant access through a simple self-service portal.

For the techies amongst you, Kuwait Oil installed the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) to help overcome enterprise mobility challenges and safeguard their evolving network. Kuwait Oil upgraded their earlier Cisco Network Administration Control (NAC) licenses to the ISE solution. View the full press release here.

To learn more, check out our industrial solutions and security offerings and we encourage you to ask any questions in the comments section below.

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