ISA Global Cybersecurity Alliance Appoints Advisory Board Leadership

Summary

Nov. 18, 2020 - The ISA Global Cybersecurity Alliance (ISAGCA) has appointed a chairperson–Megan Samford, VP, chief product security officer for Energy Management at Schneider Electric–and vice chairperson–Sharul Rashid, custodian engineer and group technical authority of Instrumentation and Control at PETRONAS–to its advisory board.

The International Society of Automation created the ISA Global Cybersecurity Alliance to increase cybersecurity awareness and readiness, bringing end-user companies, automation and control systems providers, IT infrastructure providers, services providers, system integrators, and other cybersecurity stakeholder organizations together to address growing threats across many vertical sectors.

ISAGCA’s Advisory Board Chairperson Megan Samford, VP, chief product security officer for Energy Management at Schneider Electric, is a security executive with focus on industrial control systems security, critical infrastructure protection, and risk analysis. In taking her role at Schneider Electric, Samford became the first female CPSO for a major industrial without first being a CISO, a significant milestone for women in industrial control systems security. She is currently leading a community driven effort under ISAGCA known as Incident Command System for Industrial Control Systems (ICS4ICS), which seeks to establish an operational incident response organization by Q1 2021. ICS4ICS includes a common language for responding to cyber incidents and provide avenues for mutual assistance between organizations.

ISAGCA is made up of 40 member companies, representing more than $240 billion in aggregate revenue across more than 2,400 combined worldwide locations. Automation and cybersecurity provider members serve 31 different industries, underscoring the broad applicability of the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards.

“As the first Founding Member of the ISAGCA, Schneider Electric remains deeply committed to collaborating across industry to help our customers and all end users, regardless of segment and geography, secure and protect their people, assets and operations,” Samford said. “The ISA Standards Committee created the prevailing ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards by leveraging use cases from more than 20 different verticals. Our goal now is to build on that great work by expanding awareness, adoption, and application of the standard. I am excited to work with the diversity of ISAGCA membership to develop the programs and create the resources we need to meet our objectives. I am also excited to see community-identified needs and focused initiatives, like ICS4ICS, come to life through ISAGCA and its relationships with other non-profits and governments from around the world. Together, we will drive a standards-based, end-to-end approach—encompassing people, processes, and technology—to help safeguard global industry from sophisticated cyberattacks.”

The Advisory Board Vice Chairperson, Sharul Rashid, is custodian engineer and group technical authority of Instrumentation and Control at PETRONAS, Malaysia's fully integrated oil and gas company. Sharul has more than 30 years of experience managing and leading teams and strategies covering a diverse range of instrumentation and control issues in refineries, gas liquefaction, petrochemicals, and gas pipeline transmission. PETRONAS, the world’s fourth-largest exporter of LNG, will intensify efforts towards reducing direct emissions from operations and the electricity used by the company and recently pledged to become a net zero emitter of greenhouse gases by 2050.

“I am honored to work with my colleagues around the world to advance critical cybersecurity initiatives,” commented Rashid. “Together, we will work to increase awareness and expertise, developing best practice tools to help companies successfully navigate the lifecycle of cybersecurity protection.”

ISA is the developer of the ANSI/ISA 62443 series of automation and control systems cybersecurity standards, which have been adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission as IEC 62443 and endorsed by the United Nations. The standards define requirements and procedures for implementing electronically secure automation and industrial control systems and security practices and assessing electronic security performance. The standards approach the cybersecurity challenge in a holistic way, bridging the gap between operations and information technology.