In the following series of blogs, we'll go back to basics and run down everything you need to know to get started in functional safety. We'll start with some more general terms and descriptions and make our way to more advanced material.
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Walking into work last week and seeing this article reassured me why I work at exida. Incidents, like this recent one at a pesticide plant in eastern China, are why we push every day to help educate people about the importance of functional safety.
In the following series of blogs, we'll go back to basics and run down everything you need to know to get started in functional safety. We'll start with some more general terms and descriptions and make our way to more advanced material.
Functional safety means the…
An owner-operator engineer compared the failure rates for two similar products from an exida certificate with those from a TÜV Italia certificate. exida numbers were an order of magnitude higher. Who is right?
There are some relevant fundamental facts in the field of Reliability Engineering:
This year, make your New Year’s resolution safety!
Take a moment this year and think about where you currently stand with functional safety. And actually, be honest with yourself. REALLY honest. Do you proof test on time, or does it sometimes get pushed out? Do you pull your devices…
Cybersecurity continues to be an overlooked aspect in organizations—including those owning ICS (Industrial Control System) production facilities. Anyone following the news has most assuredly heard of the plethora of massive data breaches that organizations have endured over the last…
When I went to set my goals for 2019, I set both personal and professional goals. One of my professional goals is to clean off my desk, but another is to get more people to think about functional safety before an accident occurs, instead of when they are normally…
SILSafeData contains upper and lower bound ranges of dangerous undetected failure rates for many automation devices. It was created by exida using statistical analysis of FMEDA failure rate predictions. The component database used in the FMEDAx tool is based on…
Have you noticed that over the last several years, cybersecurity seems to be “trending?”
Companies of all sizes are starting to learn how to prevent, or at least minimize, these attacks. They hire third-party experts and attend trainings to learn more about the human and system weaknesses that are…
Today’s owner operators and lease operators of industrial production facilities frequently employ service providers for projects and upgrades, as well as operations and maintenance. These contractors often travel to many sites, carry their own copies of source code and files, and use multiple PCs with multiple engineering tools for…
Personnel responsible for protecting organizational assets within Operations Technology (OT) groups would seem to have the same mission as those responsible for protecting organizational assets within Information Technology (IT) groups, and be tightly aligned. Spending any amount of time with Industrial Control System (ICS) clients, however, shows that is…
The exposure of industrial facilities to cybersecurity threats has never been higher. An analysis performed by IBM security found that the number of attacks on SCADA systems increased 636% from 2012 to 2014, with 675,816 cybersecurity incidents in January 2014 [1]. Finding an effective method for evaluating the current…
I’ve heard this phrase so many times in my life… “<Something> is the best thing since sliced bread.” I personally can’t remember a time when sliced bread was not available, but I certainly remember going to the deli and having them use the slicing machine before handing me a bag…
With the appearance of malware and nation state attacks on Industrial Control Systems (ICS), such as the Stuxnet (2010), Industroyer (2016) and TRITON (2017) attacks, the IEC 62433 standards are gaining wider attention.
While the potential targets to attack in an ICS system are many-fold, one plant asset that…
IEC 61508 functional safety certification began in the 1990s. As I recall, the only organizations doing this work in those days were TÜV Rheinland and TÜV Product Services (now TÜV Sud). These two companies remain competitors.
Functional safety certification started with logic solvers. Some engineers and regulators at the…