Factory floor exposure grows as OT security spending climbs
Manufacturing cybersecurity spending is climbing fast, and the growth is exposing weak factory floor operational technology (OT).
Anyone running production plants are stuck with a decision that doesn’t have a comfortable answer: keep OT isolated and accept that isolation is eroding on its own, or connect it to enterprise IT and inherit a new set of exposures.
Industrial networks used to rely on physical separation from corporate systems. Industrial IoT platforms have made that separation impractical, since plant telemetry now needs to reach enterprise software for the analytics and automation promises that justified the IIoT investment in the first place. A plant manager can’t take a conveyor line offline mid-shift to patch a fifteen-year-old programmable logic controller (PLC) without accepting an output loss.
Vendor demonstrations rarely show that trade-off. Automated patching and instant asset discovery tend to work cleanly in synthetic test environments, where firmware versions are known, network maps...
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