Standards committee proposes Security Compliance Institute

At a May 2007 meeting with the ISA-sponsored Automation Standards Compliance Institute, an ad-hoc group of asset owners and suppliers of industrial automation technology and services moved forward with a plan to establish an ISA Security Compliance Institute.

The group’s mission is to decrease the time, cost and risk of developing, acquiring and deploying control systems by establishing a collaborative, industry-based program among asset owners, suppliers and other stakeholders.

The program is designed to:

• Facilitate independent testing and certification of control system products to a defined set of control system security standards
• Use existing control system security industry standards where available, develop or facilitate development of interim standards where they don’t already exist and adopt new standards when they become available
• Accelerate the development of industry standards that can be used to certify that control systems products meet a common set of security requirements. A goal of the organization is to push conformance testing into the product development life cycle.