Accenture has opened a trio of practice ranges in which companies can have a crack at responding to cyber-attacks.
The new "cyber ranges" are specifically aimed at assisting industrial companies in the oil and gas, chemicals, utilities, and manufacturing industries to improve their cybersecurity.
Each site is a controlled, interactive, and hyper-realistic environment for cybersecurity training and software development used to assess network and other technical vulnerabilities of industrial control systems (ICS).
Such systems are commonly used to automate processes in critical infrastructure industries, such as utilities, petrochemicals, oil and gas, and industrial manufacturing.
One of the ranges, sited inside Accenture's Industry X.0 Innovation Center in Essen, Germany, is dedicated to the utilities and chemicals industries, with a particular focus on electric distribution networks and chemical plants.
The other two ranges have been established on American soil. The first, located in Accenture’s Cyber Fusion Center in Washington, DC, is aimed specifically at helping companies in the utilities industry learn how to protect themselves from threat actors.
The second US cybersecurity testing facility has been opened up inside one of Accenture's innovation hubs in Houston, Texas. Named the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Cyber Range, this site is intended to support leading oil and gas companies in their cybersecurity efforts.
Early next year, Accenture will open its first ICS Cyber Fusion Center, also in Houston, Texas. The center, which is currently under construction, is being created with the intention to help the company's clients protect their industrial networks and plants assets better.
Other Accenture Cyber Fusion Centers are already up and running in India, Prague, Tokyo, and Israel.
"The energy industry has the largest installed base of industrial control systems around the world, and the cyber risk has never been greater," said Luis Luque, ICS cybersecurity global lead at Accenture Security.
"Securing and defending these large and complex industrial systems requires not only improving processes and tools, but also adopting cybersecurity practices for operational maintenance and resilience programs. With the expansion of our ICS cybersecurity capabilities, we can deliver the most comprehensive security solutions tailored across the ICS environment, delivered by people who understand the zero-loss time imperative our industry expects."