Many companies around the world with industrial operations environments, commonly referred to as operational technology (OT) environments, do not invest the same resources to protect OT systems as they do to secure their corporate enterprise environments. Yet, these same companies are investing significantly to transform these environments with modern technologies and techniques to improve productivity, become more efficient, increase worker collaboration through increased data analytics and achieve other benefits that will make the company more competitive through higher quality and cost-effective products.
Some of these new industrial process improvements include reduced latency through edge computing and 5G technologies, autonomous vehicles, robotics, cloud computing, industrial Internet of things (IIoT) devices, remote access and more. Yet, the age-old problem continues to exist whereby insufficient cybersecurity controls make these environments easy targets for cybercriminals and nation-state cyberattacks. The industrial OT environments are critical to a company’s financial well-being and, depending on what the company produces, may be essential for the functioning of the broader society and economy. A recent example is the semiconductor shortage that has impacted many companies that produce all types of electronic products, mobile phones and cars. The risk and impact of an OT attack are much higher than a cyberattack on these same companies’ corporate enterprise environment where they invest significantly today.
Most companies are taking shortcuts by looking for easy and cheap ways to protect their OT environments. This typically involves the purchase of OT intrusion detection system (IDS) technology that can help with device discovery, network visualization, some type of signature-based malware detection and device vulnerabilities. This is a good start, but this type of solution is far from a comprehensive security program that is required to mitigate the company’s risk from a broad set of OT threats.
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