Manufacturing on Andrew Healey

The SANS ICS Five Critical Controls: incident response, architecture, monitoring, remote access, vulnerability management

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:01:46 -0500

The SANS ICS Five Critical Controls: incident response, architecture, monitoring, remote access, vulnerability management. Pretty familiar to technology folks, but much more challenging in live production.

Isolating the wrong host can stop a line or create a safety problem. Segmentation means a new network that rarely gets a maintenance window or carving it up like swiss cheese for vendor support. Monitoring has to be passive and protocol-aware, because the active scanning we take for granted in IT can knock over a PLC. Secure remote access means tracking down every integrator and OEM who has had a standing VPN for a decade. Vulnerability management means accepting that some assets will never be patched, so you prioritize by what the process can survive.

Wifi 8 is coming in 2028 with concepts coming out now

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:43:43 -0500

Wifi 8 is coming in 2028 with concepts coming out now. The IEEE is calling it “Ultra High Reliability,” something that’s a welcome shift, especially for those battling the usual challenges in manufacturing.

Anyone running a plant or warehouse knows the problem hasn’t been throughput since maybe the very earliest installs. Instead, it’s usually the scan gun that drops mid-pallet, the handheld that clings to a far access point instead of roaming, or the sensor that goes quiet behind a rack of steel. And on top of that, we keep adding devices (sensors, handhelds, IoT, displays) to these environments to feed our incessant thirst for more data.

Invest in your own judgement

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:40:11 -0600

I’ve spent the vast majority of my career in manufacturing. They haven’t all been the companies that show up in Harvard Business Review case studies, something I’ve come to see that as an advantage.

When you’re not at a company with infinite resources and a thousand engineers, you learn to be deliberate. You accept constraints while still delivering results. No excuses. You can’t buy your way out of problems. You can’t throw headcount at complexity. You have to understand what actually matters and focus there.