Spike Reply uses Inseego 5G industrial gateway in critical infrastructure project

The challenge – Stringent criteria for critical infrastructure

Spike Reply’s Maurice Al-Khaliedy specializes in helping companies in the oil and gas and energy sectors continuously improve their cybersecurity position. Not surprisingly, the solutions he suggests for these critical infrastructure projects must meet particularly stringent criteria.

In addition to security techniques, such as privileged access management PAM and anomaly detection, Al-Khaliedy must also consider how software updates are applied, by which party, and from which location. To further minimize risks, solutions must be resistant to physical intrusion and environmental damage. They can’t have reliability issues, and they must support redundancy.

The solution – A 5G gateway for mission-critical environments

Inseego’s Wavemaker 5G Industrial Gateway S2000e models with 5G dipole antennas were ideal for a Spike Reply pilot project with a gas supplier in Germany. The 5G Industrial Gateway provides high-performance, low-latency connectivity and the features needed for secure and reliable operation in the gas supplier’s environment:

• Enterprise-grade security, including a device cybersecurity agent, Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall, multiple virtual private network (VPN) security protection mechanisms, and full encryption for logs.
• Ruggedized operation, with support for temperatures ranging from -30 °C to 65 °C.
• Redundant wireless connectivity with support for SIM cards from two different wireless service providers and automatic failover.
• Flexible wireless connectivity with support for simultaneous 4x4 multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) LTE and 5G, public and private wireless networks, and six ports for antenna connections.

The cloud-based Inseego Connect application provides secure management control of all Inseego gateways from anywhere in the world.

The results – Secure, remote maintenance access

The gas company’s maintenance providers now have secure, remote access to mission-critical applications running on engineering stations in the field.

The continuous high speeds, stable connectivity 24x7, and robust security the gateways provide are all important to the gas company’s operations. And the ability to support two SIM cards and automatically fail over to the secondary wireless network is crucial for security, resilience, and business continuity at the remote sites.

“Maintenance access is a significant area of concern we discuss at length with our customers. With the consolidated service access the Inseego 5G Industrial Gateway enables, and the ability to easily update all the Inseego products themselves, our customers have significant peace of mind in this area.”

– Maurice Al-Khaliedy, Principal Cybersecurity Consultant at Spike Reply