BlastWave

BlastWave makes BlastShield, a product that segments an OT network and controls remote access to it without relying on firewall rulesets or passwords. The company is based in California and led by co-founder and CEO Tom Sego, and it was started by former executives and technologists from Apple and Cisco. BlastShield combines three things that are usually bought separately: microsegmentation, secure remote access and passwordless multi-factor authentication. It also hides protected devices from network scans, which BlastWave calls network cloaking. The appeal for a small OT team is consolidation. BlastWave positions BlastShield as a replacement for the VPN, and in our own testing it handled segmentation and remote access in a single application.

Segmentation is usually the slow part of an OT security project. Doing it with firewalls and VLANs means redesigning the network, writing rulesets and scheduling outages. BlastShield takes a different route. Gateways installed on site build encrypted, authenticated peer-to-peer tunnels to each device or group of devices. Staff and contractors are given access only to the systems they are responsible for, and that access can be granted or revoked in real time. The gateways stay on site and the management software is cloud-hosted, which keeps the hardware footprint small. Our OT cyber experts tested it hands-on and found that a network can be segmented in hours, not weeks.

On OT Cyber Direct the BlastShield Segmentation Gateway comes as a pair of gateways, priced by the number of endpoints you need to protect, with tiers up to 150 endpoints listed on the product page. Larger or multi-site networks are quoted. BlastWave includes installation support at no extra cost, and most teams with some networking experience get a first setup running in a few hours. BlastShield is also half of our OT Cybersecurity Starter Kit Bundle, alongside the NetAlly CyberScope, for teams that want to find what is on the network and then segment it in one purchase. We currently ship BlastWave orders within the United States only. If your network has more than one site, talk to one of our OT cyber experts before ordering so the gateways are sized correctly.