For bulk power system operators, NERC CIP isn’t aspirational guidance, but enforceable law with penalties of up to six figures per violation per day. And the one thing every auditor wants to see isn’t a policy document or a stated intention: it’s verifiable, timestamped proof of the actual state of each cyber asset. DeviceLink™ was built to provide exactly that, continuously and automatically, across every PLC, HMI and robotic controller in your OT environment.
Why existing approaches fall short
Configuration backups, where they exist, are typically manual, inconsistent, and stored across individual engineer laptops and USB drives in ways that don’t map cleanly to compliance reporting requirements. When production stops or an auditor asks a pointed question, teams are left guessing which file is the right one, or spending days reconstructing a history that should have been captured automatically.
How DeviceLink closes the gap
Copia’s DeviceLink was built specifically for this problem. Secure local agents connect to your PLCs, HMIs, and robotic controllers using outbound-only communication, maintaining a zero-trust security posture with no firewall changes required. Backups run on a schedule or on-demand, always pulled directly from the live device, never from a potentially outdated local copy.
Every captured backup syncs automatically into Copia’s Git-based Source Control, transforming scattered static files into a searchable, versioned archive tagged with rich metadata: site, line, device, and timestamp. Visual diffs let you instantly compare a device’s running state against its last-known-good version. And when you need to restore, you’re restoring verified logic with a complete audit trail attached.
DeviceLink’s change history is locked at the point of capture, ensuring what you present to auditors is an accurate record of what happened, not a reconstructed narrative. What once took compliance teams two or more days to piece together gets answered in minutes from a single, centralized view.
With DeviceLink:
- CIP-010: Automated baseline capture per device, with continuous change detection that surfaces unauthorized modifications before they become reportable incidents.
- CIP-007: Version-controlled firmware and software inventory at the asset level, updated continuously rather than on a snapshot schedule.
- Audit response: Timestamped diffs exportable for compliance reporting, enabling teams to respond to auditor inquiries in minutes rather than days.
From compliance burden to continuous assurance
Organizations using DeviceLink shift from reactive compliance, assembling evidence under pressure, to continuous assurance where the evidence is always current, always accessible, and always tied to the device. Backup health is monitored across all assets from a single centralized view. Alerts fire immediately when backups fail, are missed, or devices go offline. Every backup and restore is traced with versioning built for compliance and accountability.
Read more in Copia’s latest whitepaper, Beyond Operational Readiness for NERC CIP-003-9.
