Information Security Factors in the Implementation of Industrial Control System into Cloud Environment

Cloud environment is one of the fastest growing technology in the IT industry. This is due to the proven, reliable services and the ability to access "Cloud" anywhere and anytime. Industrial Control System (ICS) is a general term that included several types of control systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Distributed Control System (DCS) and Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), used in industrial production and critical infrastructures. For both Cloud and ICS, providing information security is a major concern. Before implementing ICS into the Cloud, it is important for an ICS organization to identify the information security factors first in both ICS and Cloud. Failure to acknowledge the information security factors may lead to implementation failure and information lost. In this paper, qualitative approach was employed due to the purposed of this research to explore the expert's validation on the information security factors. Seven ICS and Cloud experts with several years of experience in each and both fields were interviewed. The main focus of this study is to verify the information security factors that have been collected from the literature review by the expert point of view. This study also reveals that there are some factors that the ICS and Cloud experts does not agree to as an important factor that needs to be acknowledged.