Honeywell Expands Cybersecurity, Life Science Automation Offerings

Honeywell has announced new automation solutions for the cybersecurity and life sciences industries, with the launch of Cyber Watch and Product Quality Review services.

The announcements build on Honeywell’s first phase of cybersecurity risk and vulnerability management, which was announced in May, and included an operational technology (OT) cybersecurity tool, Cyber Insights, and a smart building management system.

Cyber Watch 

Cyber Watch is designed to help organizations identify and manage OT cyber threats, providing insights into vulnerabilities, configuration issues and compliance gaps to boost resilience at the OT level.

The company said the launch responds to the rising instances of cyber attacks as, with findings from Forrester Research foundsaying almost three-quarters of organizations reported one or more data breaches in the past 12 months. 

“A lot of our clients today still find themselves in a situation where they’re doing assessments in a fairly manual or semi-automatic way,” Michael Ruiz, Honeywell’s vice president of cyber innovation said in a media briefing. “They do these assessments in a timeframe of one or two years and often aren’t able to respond to the challenges we have today in the market. What we need in today's cyber threat environment is the ability to have real-time threat detection and vulnerability management. 

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“Our focus is on OT cyber situational awareness –- asking do we have a complete and total in-depth picture of companies’ systems. More and more, our customers want the ability to look at all of their sites and see their OT as a whole. The technologies we’re developing are really geared around enabling that, deploying advanced analytics for active OT cyber defense so that we can make sense of all of a company’s collected data.”

The solution builds on Honeywell’s previously -announced cybersecurity tool, Cyber Insights, which collects information from multiple OT data sources to identify vulnerabilities and threats. 

“The intersection of cyber watch and cyber insights allows us to have a deeper understanding of the organization,” said Ruiz. “This wider view allows us to make more informed decisions in the cybersecurity space in a way that limits the attack surface and creates a more end-to-end integrated solution for our clients.”

Product Quality Review

The company also announced the launch of Product Quality Review, an automation application to “streamline product quality review” in the life sciences industry.

Introduced as the first in a series of applications in the new Honeywell Life Sciences Applications Suite, the system automates the data collection, analysis and report creation processes for medical product manufacturers. 

“The reality of the way the work is done today is that a lot of it happens on paper or in disconnected Excel spreadsheets,” said Oxana Pickeral, Honeywell’s vice president of connected life sciences at the media briefing. “It's highly laborious, it pulls data from various sources such as laboratory systems, manufacturing systems and quality systems. It's an inefficient product process that can take more than six months. 

“By automating the process, we’re allowing companies to perform product quality reviews more regularly, and make decisions more predictive and proactive, deriving insights closer to a time where they can actually make a difference.”