OT security is different: Why industrial environments require a new approach to cyber risk

Operational Technology environments operate in the physical world. They run production lines, utilities, transport systems, building controls and other critical operations where a cyber incident can cause more than data loss. It can interrupt essential services, halt production, damage equipment or create risks to people and the environment.

But OT security cannot simply be approached as an extension of traditional IT security. Industrial assets may remain operational for decades, rely on specialist protocols and legacy technologies, and be difficult to patch or replace. Security decisions must prioritise safety, availability and process reliability, while recognising that disruptive or automated responses that work in IT may be unsuitable on a live plant or operational network.

Join Brian Martin, Director of Product Management, An Nguyen, Managing Director OT, and Martin Potgieter, Regional CTO, as they explore how organisations can take a modern, risk-based approach to protecting increasingly connected OT environments.

They will examine why asset visibility is the essential starting point for OT security, how organisations can identify and prioritise exposures according to operational impact, and why network segmentation and secure access are critical as employees, suppliers and third parties connect remotely to industrial systems. They will also discuss the role of identity and privileged-access controls in governing who and what can reach critical operational assets.

The session will look at how OT-aware monitoring can distinguish malicious activity from legitimate operational changes, how threat information from OT and IT environments can be brought together, and why incident response must be coordinated with engineering and operational teams. Finally, the speakers will consider how playbooks, exercises, forensic readiness and recovery planning can help organisations respond effectively and resume operations safely following an incident.

How well could your organisation answer five fundamental questions: What is connected, what is exposed, who has access, what is happening, and are we ready to respond?

This webinar will help security, technology and operational leaders understand the controls, capabilities and collaboration needed to protect modern industrial environments without losing sight of what matters most: safe, reliable and resilient operations.

What you will learn:

• Why OT security is different from IT security, including the importance of safety, availability, operational continuity, specialist protocols and long asset lifecycles.

• How to establish reliable asset visibility and understand the systems, communications and operational dependencies within an OT environment.

• How to prioritise vulnerabilities and exposures according to operational risk, rather than relying solely on conventional technical severity scores.

• How segmentation, firewall governance and secure network boundaries can limit unnecessary connectivity and reduce opportunities for threats to spread.

• How to secure remote, vendor and privileged access while supporting legitimate maintenance and operational requirements.

• How OT-aware threat detection and investigation work, including the value of correlating industrial alerts with identity, remote-access, firewall, endpoint and wider IT telemetry.

• Why OT incident response must be safety-led, with deliberate escalation and containment decisions coordinated across security, engineering, operations and leadership.

• How playbooks, exercises and recovery-readiness assessments can strengthen resilience before an incident occurs.