KEC secures 5,000 assets across 65 countries for the world's second-largest tower manufacturer

KEC International Ltd., part of the RPG Group and headquartered in Mumbai, India, is the world’s second largest manufacturer of electric power transmission towers. The manufacturer also provides products and services to infrastructure sectors, such as railways, civil engineering, oil and gas, and renewable energy. It operates across India, the UAE, and the Americas, with a workforce of 7,500 people. To date, the company has delivered cutting-edge manufacturing projects in over 110 countries. It prides itself on offering innovative designs and superior engineering and manufacturing capabilities.

Head of IT and Global CISO Pradipta Patro is responsible for securing the organization’s 5,000 assets, which are dispersed across 65 countries globally. He oversees a team of 54 people, with each plant having its own IT manager. A central IT team provides guidance on best practices to the plant IT managers.

KEC's converged IT/OT environment had outgrown manual asset discovery

KEC’s assets include industrial components such as transmission distributions, manufacturing system subfloors, and other operational technology (OT), which converge in a single IT environment. As Patro points out, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting physical infrastructure, due to the high impact of a breach in these environments, potentially disrupting production, damaging equipment, creating safety hazards, and impacting the supply chain.

“The key driver for us is to avoid production losses,” he explains. “If one of my assembly lines is cut off, processes are impacted.” Ensuring operational stability, continuity, and business predictability were his top priorities in seeking a modern solution with automated capabilities to identify, classify, and prioritize asset vulnerabilities and exposures in real time to accelerate risk mitigation.

One of the challenges KEC faced was a lack of visibility into its asset estate, especially with its legacy systems. Another was not being able to remotely monitor and control OT devices that are not connected to the internet. Without a connection, there was no way to discover and prioritize vulnerabilities. KEC’s OEM suppliers also needed access to maintain equipment.

Before deploying Armis from ServiceNow, adding AI-powered asset intelligence to the IT environment, KEC struggled with a cumbersome and ineffective manual asset discovery system. This created security blind spots, making it difficult to determine when critical applications, such as the endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, were not activated or operating as they should. This lack of visibility created security gaps and compliance risk. As an organization in the critical infrastructure sector, KEC is required to adhere to frameworks such as ISO and ISA/IEC 62443.

KEC connected Armis to its existing SOC, SIEM, and SOAR instead of replacing them

KEC deployed Armis at five sites in India as part of a phased implementation. The solution provides complete end-to-end visibility into KEC’s assets across its entire IT/OT estate. Currently, 11 employees manage Armis, with a central IT team providing governance and oversight.

The deployment included integrations with KEC’s security tools, including SentinelOne for endpoint detection and response (EDR), Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks for perimeters, and HP for network access control (NAC). Armis is also fully integrated with KEC’s security operations center (SOC), security information and event management (SIEM) solution, and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology. In the near future, KEC plans to integrate Armis with its ticketing tool.

“Processes like asset discovery and vulnerability remediation that were previously manual are now done automatically in real time. With Armis, we have greatly improved our situational awareness, visibility into the assets connected to our network, and overall security posture,” says Patro.

Armis also enables KEC’s OEMs to securely connect into its network environment from remote locations to provide preventive maintenance and support.

Mean time to respond dropped 20 to 30% once KEC could see its full environment

With full visibility across the global KEC environment, vulnerabilities are now easily prioritized for rapid remediation. Patro notes, “The mean time to respond is 20 to 30% faster.” Rich, contextualized data from Armis provides a high degree of accuracy and detail, empowering teams to prioritize the vulnerabilities that matter most. Additionally, KEC feeds data from Armis into AI/ML models that use real-time telemetry to improve system reliability and sustainability by automating workflows, thereby further reducing response time.

In addition to uncovering and remediating vulnerabilities, Armis helps KEC identify inactive or dormant systems, along with uninstalled applications. “Now we have complete visibility into OT and IT and can prioritize those 10% to 20% cases. This is how Armis helps us minimize cyber exposure in real time,” says Patro.

Six more sites are next as KEC works toward Industry 4.0 and Lighthouse status

By following these best practices, KEC is working toward its Lighthouse Project Certifications and achieving recognition as a Global Lighthouse within the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Lighthouse Network. Patro estimates that it will take at least another three to four years to implement all the technology for Industry 4.0, another name for the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Industry 4.0, Patro explains, involves automating processes to get better efficiency and productivity from systems. It improves sustainability by using sensors, for example, to optimize material handling. It also measures carbon footprint automatically by interconnecting operations with the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to improve productivity and optimize resources across the entire supply chain.

“Armis plays a major role in modernizing and securing large manufacturing operations. Companies are looking for a comprehensive, unified platform like Armis—the days of siloed solutions are over,” says Patro.

He fully anticipates that Armis will play a pivotal role in delivering the necessary data for KEC to achieve its Lighthouse certification in the coming years while supporting its security strategy to accommodate global expansion of its production facilities. He looks forward to rolling out Armis to six additional locations as part of the next phase.

“With a bright future ahead of us, we look forward to growing our partnership with Armis over the long-term,” says Patro.