Case Study: Tata Chemicals Provides Secure Remote Access for Employees, Contractors, and Vendors

Tata Chemicals is a trona ore mining and processing company based in southwest Wyoming. Tata operates both OT and IT networks and must ensure secure access to both for employees as well as external users.

This short video examines why the Tata team chose the Cyolo secure remote access solution and highlights the features IT Manager McKay Smith describes as "a gamechanger."

Video Transcript

McKay Smith, IT Manager, Tata Chemicals: Part of the reason that we engaged Cyolo was to work through a cybersecurity roadmap. We have a number of use cases that are maybe a little bit outside the box, especially in an industrial environment. We have OT networks, which are operational technology networks, as well as IT networks. Cyolo worked with us to allow access for not only employees but vendors into both of those networks, which is unique in a lot of cases.

Up front we discussed our use cases with Cyolo and prioritized those. One of the primary focuses that we had was on securing external access into our networks and making sure that we don't have a data breach from an outside source. And we use Cyolo  to help us with that.

Gibson Mark, Senior Systems Administrator, Tata Chemicals: The main features that we were needing require MFA for specific applications through the Cyolo web portal, as well as requiring MFA to access systems between different security zones. So, from IT to OT, for example, that access is now controlled and logged and requires MFA so that if a user's credential is compromised, they can't jump between the security zones via that remote access, it's controlled via Cyolo.

Smith: We use Cyolo to grant and to monitor vendor/contractor access to our internal systems, data, PLCs, all those kind of things that they need to access. One of the nice things about Cyolo is that we can record sessions, [and] we can ask for manager approval in order to allow those people in. Everyone knows when they're accessing any of our resources, and it's all approved. Those features have made Cyolo a gamechanger for us.

The ultimate result is that we now are able to have secure remote access for employees, contractors, and vendors. We know when they come into our networks, we know what they're going to access, we can go back and review those sessions and determine if they're doing what we authorized them to do. And so now we have confidence that all those different groups are accessing when, where and what we've really outlined in that agreement. 

If you're a business looking to improve your network security, I would recommend that you consider the many use cases that you might be considering now and down the road. Cyolo was able to handle pretty much all of our use cases and saved us a lot of time and effort.