This brief guide will explain how to take IEC 62443 training at a much lower cost today than in earlier years.
Note: The most cost effective and easiest way to learn all IEC 62443 essentials is to take the Abhisam Certified Industrial Cybersecurity Professional training course. This fully self-paced, online course consisting of text, voice over, videos, animations, assessments and exercises, can be taken anytime from anywhere via any internet enabled device with a browser. This is the only Industrial Cybersecurity training course which covers basic to intermediate level stuff and is sufficient for most professionals, who are either Instrumentation, Automation, Control System engineers and technicians, IT cybersecurity professionals who wish to learn about OT security, Process Safety professionals, Functional Safety professionals and other Risk Assessment professionals who have to deal with Risk Assessment and Mitigation related to industrial assets such as manufacturing plants, oil & gas facilities, ships & transportation vehicles, port operations and other areas where OT cybersecurity risks exist.
It is also essential cybersecurity training for managers from Asset Owners, Industrial Automation vendors and system integrators, as well as Design professionals from consulting or EPC companies who design, build, install and commission manufacturing plants and facilities, utility skids and similar units.
What is IEC 62443?
IEC 62443 is a set of standards, practices and technical reports that are the result of efforts of different standards groups and technical committees of voluntary bodies and standards organizations. Mainly these are ISA (Instrumentation, Systems and Automation society) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). Some parts have been developed by ISA committees and other parts by working groups of IEC.
After receiving American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approval, this standard is officially now referred to as ANSI/ISA/IEC 62443. However most people refer to it as simply IEC 62443. Note that all parts have not been published yet but the parts that are available are useful in protecting OT systems from cyber attacks.
For those new to the OT security standard IEC 62443, please refer to the IEC 62443 guide published by us earlier.
Why should you know about IEC 62443?
Many industries and facilities such as Chemical Manufacturing plants, Oil and Gas production platforms, Oil refineries, silicon wafer fabs, pharmacuetical manufacturing, clean rooms, water utilities, pipelines, oil terminals, ports and other critical infrastructure depend on Operational Technology (OT) to run them. These may use different OT systems such as (but not limited to) DCS (Distributed Control Systems), PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems), SIS (Safety Instrumented Systems), or similar specialized systems such as HIPPS (High Integrity Pressure Protection Systems), BMS (Burner Management Systems), Fire and Gas Systems (F&G) or BAS (Building Automation Systems).
If you are dealing with securing these Operational Technology systems, then you need to know about this standard, in addition to the NIST 800-82 standard (Rev 3 is coming soon) or the NERC CIP (North Americam Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection) standard (if you are a bulk electricity supplier BES) in North America).
OT security is completely different from IT security because OT security is meant to provide protection to the assets themselves (such as the DCS or SCADA), as well as prevent unwanted events such as fires, explosions or toxic releases that can be triggered by an adversary attacking these systems.
Note that IT security deals with only preventing loss of data or money, data confidentiality and data privacy, but OT security deals with preventing actual disasters and harm to people and environment. Many legacy Industrial Automation, Control and Safety Systems and other OT systems were never designed with security in mind and this makes the task of securing them harder.
Hence, due to all these reasons securing these systems require a different set of knowledge and skills. A lot of recommendations made in standards such as IEC 62443 or NIST 800-82 require insights into how these systems actually work.
This standard has several parts and depending on your role and job profile, you may need to know all parts or some parts in more detail than other parts.
Where can you get IEC 62443 training ?
What is the advantage of getting IEC 62443 training online as a part of the Abhisam CICP course?
Rather than taking separate IEC 62443 courses (there are different courses that cover different parts of the standard), you can simply take the Abhisam CICP course that covers all the basics of IEC 62443 that you need to know, plus it covers IEC 62443-2-4 in great detail and also covers lot of other things that are not covered in plain IEC 62443 standard courses. Here are the reasons:
- IEC 62443 is not the only standard in the OT cybersecurity and Industrial Cybersecurity domain, although it is prominent.
- You need to understand a lot of the fundamentals of how Industrial Control Systems and Safety Instrumented Systems work, the basic concepts of cybersecurity and other stuff before you can make sense of IEC 62443.
- The Abhisam CICP certification course is not going to break your budget. This is the only course below $800 that you can get anywhere that covers everything that you need to know about ICS security and Industrial Cybersecurity. For example, the ISA/IEC 62443 cybersecurity fundamentals specialist training cost is more than the Abhisam CICP training cost.
- You get a designation as a CICP-Certified Industrial Cybersecurity Professional along with a certificate and an electronic badge that you can add to your LinkedIn profile. This makes your profile more attractive to employers, clients and even your bosses.
- If you are an Enterprise that wishes to train multiple numbers of people, then the Abhisam CICP Course Enterprise version is even more cost effective, as compared to going with other course providers. This can be deployed to your own LMS (Learning Management System) too, if you wish, so that your management can have all training courses in your own LMS. Of course, if you do not want this feature, you can also use the Abhisam Learning Portal (Abhisam’s LMS) to achieve this. You can get data of all learners, test scores, login times, time spent on modules and other data for compliance purposes.
