BP, a leader in the oil and gas industry, sought a digital solution to securely monitor both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) systems while reaping the benefits of digitization.
Network Critical’s Passive Fiber Optical TAPs enabled BP to ensure accurate and secure network monitoring, improve operational efficiency, and reduce cyberattack risks.
The oil and gas industry powers essential services like lighting, heating, and transportation, and BP is at the forefront of this critical sector.
Oil and gas operations fall into three separate categories:
These operations are geographically separate and often difficult to access physically. Therefore, remotely monitoring and controlling these widespread and diverse operations from a single location is a dramatic economic benefit. Digitizing control, however, also increases the threat landscape by having critical control operations connected to cloud services.
Aware of the benefits of digitization, BP sought to connect multiple tools for monitoring and security IT and OT systems. These tools monitor switches, firmware levels, inventory, security protocols and other critical elements at refineries that span 10-12 buildings.
Continuous monitoring is critical to digitization and automation of our many monitoring systems. Being able to monitor remote sites from a single location keeps our systems up to date without having a large staff running around in trucks.” - Senior Project Manager, Refining Operations
To address these challenges, BP implemented Network Critical’s Passive Fiber Optical TAPs. These test access points (TAPs) provided safe, accurate, and efficient connections to multiple monitoring tools, enabling real-time security and traffic analysis for both IT and OT systems.
Key features of the solution:
In addition to traffic monitoring, the solution integrated security tools capable of identifying traffic anomalies and helping detect and prevent malware or unauthorized access attempts.
In addition to monitoring control systems, we have security tools that understand our traffic patterns and look for anomalies that might signal malware or viruses attempting to embed in our systems. Unauthorized manipulation of our monitoring systems can have serious safety and production consequences. Network Critical TAP’s help us manage security without impacting network traffic.” - Director, IT Services
With Network Critical’s Passive Fiber Optical TAPs, BP successfully centralized IT and OT systems monitoring, gaining significant benefits:
By adopting Network Critical’s solutions, BP ensured robust security and efficiency across its global operations, safeguarding critical infrastructure and improving overall productivity.
Critical is an industry leader in network access technology. Our quality 1/10/25/40/100G modular TAP and Packet Broker solutions ensure that our customers have continuous network visibility. Network Critical products eliminate any concerns of downtime and our unique scale-out capabilities enable simple, cost effective expansion, as network and port density requirements grow. The health of your network is always secure with Network Critical products. Our fully flexible range of TAPs and Packet Brokers are used with IDS, IPS, network traffic monitoring tools, sniffers and many other mission critical appliances, to provide 100% network visibility with zero packet loss. With over 20 years experience, a number of industry “firsts” and a reputation for excellent customer service, Network Critical’s solutions are widely used in global networks across a wide range of sectors including Finance, Telco, Government, Energy and Healthcare.