For the Plants That Predate Networks. And the Ones Being Designed With Them Now.
IN BRIEF.
OT/IT network segmentation aligned to IEC 62443 and the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture. Plant-to-plant SD-WAN across geographically distributed operations. Industrial Wi-Fi engineered for shop-floor conditions. Cisco Cyber Vision for OT visibility and asset discovery. Ransomware defence and recovery with sub-day RTO. Legacy OT protection (older Windows systems, unpatched HMIs) via network-layer controls. Sector-specific compliance including Schedule M for pharmaceutical manufacturing and TISAX for automotive suppliers. The Proactive OT/IT Segmentation Reference Architecture for Indian Manufacturing is available as a free download.
CIOs, CISOs, Heads of IT, and OT/IT convergence leads of industrial groups, single-plant manufacturers, engineering campuses, and multi-plant multinationals operating across India's manufacturing belts.
Proactive Data Systems is a Cisco Preferred Partner across five portfolios and Cisco Advanced Customer Experience Specialised.
You Don't Need Us to Explain a Plant Floor to You.
What You Already Know
You already know your plant floor is not your office network. That the twelve-year-old PLC controlling the CNC machine cannot be patched, must not be patched, and needs to keep running until 2029 minimum. That the brownfield plant your parent company acquired last year has a Windows XP HMI that nobody's willing to replace, and nobody's willing to touch. That your MES doesn't speak to your ERP directly and probably never will.
You know that manufacturing has been the most-attacked sector in India in recent industry reports. That the sophisticated ransomware attack your peer at the pharma plant across town paid two crores to recover from started with a phishing email that reached a shop-floor engineer's laptop because the plant network wasn't segmented from the corporate one.
What You Need
Industry 4.0 is real, but the shop floor doesn't restart itself for a slide-deck migration. That your predictive-maintenance pilot needs Cisco Cyber Vision or Nozomi Networks to see what's actually on the plant network before it can predict anything. That your SAP MES vendor's implementation team assumes a network posture your infrastructure doesn't yet have.
You need a partner who has done OT/IT convergence for Indian manufacturers running Rockwell Automation and Siemens and Schneider Electric, who understands the Purdue Model isn't a diagram but a decision-making framework for where to put controls, and who won't propose a rip-and-replace when network-layer segmentation will hold you until the next capex cycle.
That's the infrastructure Proactive Data Systems has been building for India's manufacturing sector for thirty-four years.
The Infrastructure. From Plant Floor to Board Room.
Proactive delivers seven specific capabilities for Indian manufacturing infrastructure.
OT/IT Network Segmentation aligned to IEC 62443 zone-and-conduit design and the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (Levels 0 through 5). Industrial DMZ where the enterprise network meets the manufacturing zone.
Plant-to-Plant SD-WAN using Cisco Meraki MX or Catalyst SD-WAN, with QoS and traffic engineering for MES and ERP data flows and MPLS-alternative resilience across Indian carrier options.
Industrial Wi-Fi using Cisco IW (Industrial Wireless) or Meraki, engineered for shop-floor RF conditions: metal-heavy environments, temperature swings, forklift-generated interference.
Cisco Cyber Vision deployment for OT asset visibility, protocol-aware anomaly detection, and integration with your SOC.
Ransomware Defence and Recovery with sub-day RTO. Immutable backups (Cohesity DataProtect or Rubrik) for plant-floor systems. Pre-drafted recovery runbooks tested twice a year in tabletop exercises with your CISO.
Legacy OT Protection for systems that cannot be patched or upgraded (Windows XP, older Windows Server, unpatched HMIs, air-gapped-until-they're-not equipment) using network-layer virtual patching and micro-segmentation.
Sector-Specific Compliance including Schedule M for pharmaceutical manufacturing, TISAX for automotive OEM suppliers, and ISO 22301 for business continuity.
Every Architecture, Tuned for the Sector.
Each of Proactive's six architectures is delivered with manufacturing-specific patterns.
Cisco Meraki MX or Catalyst SD-WAN for plant-to-plant connectivity across geographies. Industrial Wi-Fi (Cisco IW 9165, Meraki MR) for shop-floor coverage. Purdue Model-aligned segmentation between the enterprise network and the manufacturing zone. Cisco Cyber Vision for OT visibility.
For manufacturers running local MES, historian databases (OSIsoft PI, GE Proficy), or SAP HANA close to the plant, Proactive designs plant-side edge infrastructure with Cisco UCS or Nutanix. For enterprise workloads, hybrid architectures with India regions of AWS, Azure, and GCP.
IEC 62443-aligned zone-and-conduit design. Cyber Vision for OT anomaly detection. Cisco Secure Firewall or Palo Alto NGFW at the enterprise-manufacturing boundary. SOC coverage tuned to manufacturing threat patterns (ransomware, insider risk, supply-chain compromise). Immutable backups for ransomware recovery.
Cisco Webex Calling for corporate offices and administrative staff. Ruggedised handsets and Wi-Fi calling for shop-floor supervisors and maintenance teams. Meeting rooms for plant walkthroughs and remote factory acceptance testing sessions.
Industrial-grade cabling for shop-floor environments (Cat 6A shielded, industrial connectors, cable trays designed for chemical and mechanical stress). Office-side cabling to TIA-942 standard. CCTV cabling that integrates with plant physical security systems.
24/7 NOC coverage that overlaps with plant shift patterns. Named Proactive CSMs who understand your plant maintenance calendar and change-freeze windows. SLAs that hold, with service credits when Proactive misses. On-site field engineers within four hours across India's industrial belts.
Every Segment Has a Reason.
Every architecture Proactive deploys in manufacturing ships with a segmentation-and-compliance mapping document. Which specific IEC 62443 zone each control belongs to. Which Purdue Model level it operates at. Which sector-specific requirement it addresses. Proactive keeps this mapping current with every OT vendor firmware update and IEC 62443 revision. The full reference is available in the Proactive OT/IT Segmentation Reference Architecture for Indian Manufacturing, alongside a worked example for a mid-size multi-plant industrial group.
Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) security
Zone-and-conduit design across Purdue Levels 0-5; SL-C 2 or 3 target security levels per zone.
Manufacturing network reference model
Explicit segmentation between Enterprise Zone (L4-L5), Industrial DMZ (L3.5), Manufacturing Zone (L3), and Cell/Area Zones (L0-L2).
Information Security Management System
Controls integrated with IEC 62443 for combined IT and OT compliance.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing Good Manufacturing Practices
Validated network environments, audit trails, data integrity controls aligned to 21 CFR Part 11 where applicable.
Automotive OEM suppliers
Information security posture aligned to VDA ISA catalog; assessment-ready evidence packs.
Business continuity management
RTO and RPO architecture for critical manufacturing operations.
All Indian entities, cybersecurity incidents
6-hour notification workflow, 180-day log retention, SIEM integration.
Personal data (employees, suppliers, customers)
Data protection layer applied at the enterprise IT tier; typically light touch on the plant floor.
Numbers From Real Plants.
Proactive's manufacturing engagements have produced the following measured outcomes in the last four quarters.
Zero-data-loss recovery after a ransomware event at a national manufacturer in FY25. Cohesity DataProtect immutable backups. Cross-plant impact contained by IEC 62443-aligned segmentation.
Plant-to-plant SD-WAN rolled out across an Indian engineering conglomerate in five months, with QoS carrying real-time MES telemetry between plants for the first time in the group's history.
Lohia Corp Limited, flagship of the Lohia Group and one of India's leading manufacturers of plastic woven fabric machinery, retired its legacy analogue PBX estate and migrated to Cisco Webex Cloud Calling with MPP phones and Local Gateways. Sites that had operated as isolated communication silos were unified. The mobile workforce became productive from anywhere. The upfront capital cost of a traditional PBX refresh was eliminated.
Watch the Case Study“After the successful implementation of Webex, the transformation was evident. Our collaboration and connectivity significantly enhanced our operational efficiency.”
Jagdip Kumar, CIO, Lohia Corp Limited
FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS
Book a 30-minute conversation with a Proactive manufacturing infrastructure architect. Not a sales engineer. Not an SDR. Someone who has delivered for industrial groups that look like yours and can defend the recommendations to your plant operations committee.
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