IT monitoring isn’t only for tech companies. Manufacturers might focus on their machinery, but their networking equipment is equally important for smooth productivity. Servers control user permissions and access controls. Network equipment gives technicians remote access to machinery, and infrastructure for software control manufacturing activities. All these systems must be monitored to detect any issues before they impact production, and the right managed service provider (MSP) can help.
Why Cybersecurity Monitoring is Important
In Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, cyber-threat intelligence researchers saw a stark increase in manufacturing targets between 2023 and 2024. Ransomware was the primary payload with 44% of data breaches involving ransomware in 2024. The most significant attack vector was the human element, meaning most attackers delivered their ransomware payload using phishing or social engineering to trick employees into taking action.
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A good example of this recent cybersecurity trend is in the September 2024 ransomware attack on Kawasaki Motors Europe. The attack came from a well-known ransomware group named RansomHub. As with any other ransomware attack, Kawasaki files were encrypted and held ransom. Instead of paying the cyber-criminals, Kawasaki declined. In retaliation, RansomHub leaked 487GB of stolen data. Operations were temporarily halted for a little over a week, which means the data breach affected the manufacturer’s productivity and likely cost them millions in the process.
Manufacturers spend millions in monitoring systems and IoT for their machinery, but monitoring IT equipment is just as important. Most cyber-criminal groups target businesses where cybersecurity is commonly lacking. Even when businesses set up cybersecurity infrastructure, they often forget to integrate monitoring to ensure that threats are caught quickly. Intrusion detection and intrusion prevention are necessary to stop interruptions in manufacturing, supply chain, and protection of your manufactured product.
Monitoring Infrastructure Health
Cybersecurity isn’t the only reason to monitor your environment. The health of your infrastructure is also important to ensure that the environment continues to be productive. For example, if a server’s CPU is overheating, it could crash unexpectedly bringing down all users and workstations relying on it for productivity.
Let’s say that you have a server in an environment a bit too hot for the equipment. The heat could slowly cause issues with your infrastructure hardware. Monitoring the environment for any unexpected errors including the internal heat of the CPU tells you that the environment needs cooling. If you don’t have monitoring systems in place to detect errors from heat, you could have servers that will eventually crash. Unexpected crashes lead to extensive downtime between troubleshooting and replacing any damaged hardware.
Monitoring the environment also detects any strange behavior or errors in an application. Errors in an application present several issues. First, users are frustrated when they can’t use business software as intended. Second, application errors also cause issues with data integrity. When data isn’t processed properly, it can cause data corruption, errors with orders, mistakes in shipping and customer service, and any number of service problems.
Resource Usage Monitoring
Resource usage must also be monitored to prevent users from exhausting available infrastructure. For example, data storage eventually runs out, but you won’t know if there is nothing monitoring storage capacity. Monitoring resources also covers CPU usage, memory issues, or any other number of exhausted resources that impacts performance.
Small performance issues might seem negligible at first, but accumulated performance degradation eventually impacts users and productivity. Slow applications slow down data processing, which slows down productivity like orders, shipping, customer service, financial activity, and any other number of employee actions reliant on your infrastructure.
Servers aren’t the only infrastructure that needs monitoring. Other networking equipment must be monitored. Switches, routers, workstations, application servers, and cloud resources should be monitored for any anomalies. Cloud infrastructure often has native tools to monitor it, but you still need a reliable service provider to watch for alerts and respond to any critical notifications.
The Cost of Downtime
Monitoring for all the possible issues that could affect infrastructure lets your managed service provider remediate any problems before they cause downtime. Manufacturers know the value of uptime, but they often focus on their machinery without integrating infrastructure monitoring. Without monitoring, a manufacturer could suffer from downtime.
Downtime is costly whether you have a small manufacturing plant or a large global business that supports customers around the world. Infrastructure downtime affects multiple locations, not just the location where the downtime occurs. Even for small manufacturers, the cost of downtime can be thousands of dollars an hour. For large manufacturers, the cost can be seven figures.
Add more money to downtime costs when it involves a cybersecurity event. Cybersecurity events require mandatory downtime to contain the threat. After the threat is contained, a professional must investigate and save evidence for law enforcement. Then, eradication of the threat also requires professionals. Litigation, customer reparations, and brand damage also affect costs. For manufacturers, losing just one large customer impacts revenue long-term.
All costs from downtime add up, and it can put small manufacturers into bankruptcy. Costs can be mitigated with proper monitoring. You can’t eliminate repairs to equipment or changes to the environment when they are necessary, but making changes before issues cause downtime can greatly reduce costs.
Where to Get Started
You don’t need more local staff to manage monitoring your environment. A good managed service provider can help you avoid any productivity downtime from infrastructure errors. Your MSP will install monitoring across all locations and respond to any cybersecurity incidents, repair damaged infrastructure, and configure applications to avoid errors.
Find out if your environment could be at risk with a three-minute IT health check. To find out what Corporate Technologies can do for your manufacturing business, contact us.
FAQs
Performance monitoring and system monitoring will send alerts to notify you or your MSP when anomalies occur.
Monitoring for threats saves companies thousands on potential downtime, damaged data, brand reputation damage, and productivity interruptions.
Exhausting CPU resources slows down server performance and could cause the server to crash.
If a server does not have enough memory to process user requests, it can crash or users can experience slow performance.
Your security provider will contain it, then investigate to eradicate it from the network, and save evidence to send to law enforcement.
