Electrical Review

Taking a ‘joined up' approach to factory, plant or utility security can help significantly reduce your risk, explains Bradford H Hegrat, CISSP, CISM, senior principle security consultant, Rockwell Automation

Whether your company is considered part of the UK's ‘critical infrastructure' or not, the consequences of a malicious security breach could reach catastrophic proportions. When investigating the potential repercussions of a successful attack for a cement company we learned a miniscule change to the batch – minor enough in fact for it still to pass two levels of testing - could result in a concrete application that was inherently unusable for its intended application. If this concrete was intended for a large building foundation, for example, the forces involved by the time you reached the fifth floor of construction may be enough to bring the whole lot down.

Anyone responsible for the functional safety of machinery – mechanical and electrical engineers, machine builders and systems integrators – can find help in the form of a 200-page compendium published by Pilz Automation Technology.

The Safety Compendium, which was compiled by a committee of machinery safety experts at Pilz that includes engineers, lawyers and academics, is intended as an overview or technical guide for those keen to learn more about the application of functional safety standards to machinery and all its other associated aspects.

Available to download or as a hard copy, the 200-page compendium is the successor to Pilz’s ‘Machinery Safety’ book. The Safety Compendium addresses a number of topics, including laws, directives and standards (including the new Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC); safeguards and other protective equipment; safety control technology; safety-related communications; and safe motion control. Section 2.3 of the guide includes a comparison of the old and new Machinery Directives, highlighting the differences between the two.