Howard Energy Partners is a growth-oriented energy company focused on providing innovative midstream solutions in the oil and gas industry. Their focus is on providing abundant, clean, low cost, reliable energy that powers communities and businesses.
Howard Energy had three main concerns they needed to address when it came to their networking needs. Top priority was that they needed a cost-effective way to secure their OT network. They found a lot of the options available were expensive and a better fit for IT than OT. Second, they needed a way to securely traverse the network remotely with limited field resources. Finally, they needed a product they could deploy quickly into the hands of the field techs, avoiding long, complex IT training. Other solutions required training certificates and took too much time to set up. Howard Energy found that Tosibox checked all the boxes and was easy for their technicians to learn.
Before the implementation of Tosibox, Howard Energy did not have a standard way for remotely accessing their sites. For their cybersecurity requirements, they were using a combined IT/OT network that connected to the internet. However, the OT team was worried about the security risk being open to the internet would pose. The challenge was to mitigate, and ultimately eliminate the security risk of the IT/OT network.
Director of Operational Technology, Mike Flores, says they made the switch to Tosibox for three main reasons. First, cost savings. “Tosibox reduced the cost of deployment as well as everyday expenditure on our infrastructure.” Second, the cybersecurity that Tosibox offers. “We love the protection it gives our operations.” Lastly, scalability. Mike says that Tosibox makes it easy to deploy units across plant and pipeline assets due to the flexible, multiple carrier approach of the Tosibox eSIM technology.
Since the implementation of Tosibox, Howard Energy’s technical staff is now focused on solutions and
operational improvement instead of security and infrastructure. Mike says it multiplies their resources. They find the reliability of remote access provides cost savings from sending a contractor out to the sites.
Additionally, Mike says that the use of “Tosibox gets us in bigger conversations with customers. Because of all the features and reliability, our partners trust us to handle secure data transfers.”
Since Howard Energy Partners is an OT managed services customer, Tosibox provides network design and support as well as ongoing helpdesk support. Mike appreciates how quick Tosibox is to deploy and get his team up to speed.
Tosibox saves us the headache of heavily involving the IT department. Traditional IT solutions require more people and training to deploy, maintain and access assets in the network. You can train field employees how to use Tosibox in minutes.
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