HIMA aims to shield region from industrial cyberattacks

The company yesterday started its first ever HIMA Users Conference Asia Pacific 2018 in Bangkok at the Royal Orchid Sheraton Hotel & Towers. The inaugural Users Conference provides deep industry insights on topics such as Cybersecurity, Industrial Safety, and trends of the Oil & Gas Industry in Asia Pacific. The two-day conference ends today. 
Friedhelm Best, vice president for Asia Pacific, HIMA Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, said that one of the key driving factors are regional governments and regulators taking cybersecurity more seriously, and introducing stringent regulatory frameworks and laws.
“Thailand is also driving in this direction, with the drafting of a cybersecurity bill to be tabled. Cybersecurity is a rapidly growing industry, with mew emerging threats, including some which target IoT as well. There is a critical need for hardware protection, but also support in the analysis of risk assessments and help for companies to set in place safe processes,” he said.
Best said that HIMA has been operating in Malaysia for 25 years. It also has a office in South Korea. The company started to invest in Singapore as its headquarters in Asia Pacific headquarters about two years ago. 
The company is working with local partners in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. 
“Our inroads for Thailand is mainly driven by solutions, applications and machinery pipelines. HIMA wants to bring these infrastructural benefits to Thai operators who are constantly looking for more profitable and reliable processes in their production. HIMA will also provide training and services to these operators,” said Best.
“The Asean market is a fast growing market, with consumers who are agile and open to new solutions and technologies,” he said.
Best said that the process safety market is slated to be growing at about 9 per cent in APAC and two thirds of the growth are likely to be in the gas market in Asia - a big market for process safety.

‘Safecurity’ for the industrial sector
While industrial facilities and infrastructures are adept and adequate just by being functionally safe, the field has transformed to require both safety and security today.
“Safecurity” is a natural evolution of HIMA’s laser focus on bringing Smart Safety and Security together for industrial applications. While the world defends and protects against hackers in e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, government and other sectors, the industrial sector is often neglected in terms of cybersecurity. 
HIMA has pioneered the convergence of managing both safety and security together, so that plants and infrastructures will always work well under pressure, and will not succumb to cyberattacks. Already, nine out of ten of the biggest gas companies and ten out of ten of the largest oil companies in the world rely on HIMA technologies. Standards are everything, and HIMA covers the world’s highest safety standards, ensuring that customers will comply with regulatory requirements and be ready for the future. 

Knowledge platform
“Thailand hosts one of the region’s most developed and advanced oil and gas and industrial chemicals markets, and has practitioners from the Kingdom and the region thirsting for practical and actionable knowledge. Industrial facilities and critical infrastructures are also becoming incredibly complex, with the advent of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). With the encroachment of cybersecurity and legal compliance into the industrial space, there is now a critical need to not only ensure industrial plants and critical infrastructures work around the clock without fail, but also ensure hackers are kept at bay from crippling or holding at ransom these plants and infrastructures,” said Best. 
“Having installed more than 35,000 TUV-certified safety systems worldwide over the last 45 years, we have pioneered the actionable systems philosophy of ‘Safecurity’, where Safety and Security are tightly intertwined to provide fail-safe systems at plants and infrastructures around the world. At the Users Conference 2018 in Bangkok, we have gathered a panel of practitioner-speakers to ensure that our colleagues from diverse industrial fields come together to learn and share together the mission-critical knowledge and actionable insights of ‘Safecurity’.”