Honeywell is one of the key players in the market of security systems, and offers a wide variety of products in the commercial as well as residential segments. Honeywell was exploring the possibilities of new products and services in an emerging market. My task was to explore the possibilities in the area of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) across industries.
The scope of the activity was to study different industry segments like refineries, chemical plants, etc. and their critical infrastructure, possible threats to that infrastructure, study and propose mechanisms to sense threats, mechanisms for protection and response and build scenarios to depict how the complete system would work.
The process adopted included an initial study of industry segments, type of critical infrastructure, present sense and response mechanism, Honeywell’s solutions in similar areas, stakeholders’ interviews, etc. It also involved data analysis and need identification, ideation and scenario building, and validation.
Various considerations were made while drawing solutions. Firstly, the solutions had to be such that could make the process of regulation compliance easier and less time consuming for petroleum refineries. These solutions had to be technically feasible, preferably from an existing Honeywell line of products. They had to incorporate the various inputs from various departments of a refinery and had to be accessible on an on-demand basis. The solutions had to facilitate communication between the various departments of an oil refinery.
My main achievement in this project was to come up with the core of CIP. Most security companies including Honeywell provide security technologies as CIP solution, which I found to be wrong. The solutions I came up with can not only be implemented in refineries but also in other industrial segments. These other industrial segments will now be researched in further detail based on my research in refinery segment.
