Industrial cybersecurity is a different discipline than corporate IT security. Here's the approach, and the frameworks behind it.
A corporate laptop that goes down for a patch is an inconvenience. A control system that goes down mid-shift can mean a safety incident, a line stoppage costing real money by the minute, or damaged equipment that takes weeks to replace. OT environments have different uptime requirements, different patching cadences, and often run on hardware and software that's been in service for decades. Securing them takes a program built for that reality — not a corporate IT security playbook applied to the plant floor and hoped for the best.
Physical and logical separation between plant-floor (OT) and office (IT) networks, built on industrial-grade switching — the foundational control everything else builds on.
Systematic risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation across the full asset inventory — not a one-time scan.
Frameworks that let vendors and support staff do their jobs without exposing the industrial network perimeter.
A purpose-built playbook and recurring, facilitated cyber tabletop exercises — the difference between a days-long recovery and a multi-hour one.
Directing virtual patching and intrusion-prevention rollouts built to move across dozens of sites in days, not quarters — coordinating vendor and internal teams so the work happens in parallel, not one site at a time.
OT-specific general controls, developed directly with Internal Audit, to standardize access and change management for compliance.
A general-purpose, outcomes-focused risk management framework — organizing cybersecurity activity into functions like identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. It doesn't prescribe specific technical controls; it gives you a shared structure to organize a program around and communicate it to leadership.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework, via NIST.gov ↗The federal guide specifically for operational technology and industrial control system security — asset identification, network segmentation, and the security countermeasures that actually apply to control-system environments rather than general-purpose IT.
NIST SP 800-82, via NIST CSRC ↗The international, technically prescriptive standard built specifically for industrial automation and control systems — where NIST guidance tells you what to consider, IEC 62443 gets more specific about what a system should be able to do and to what security level, across the full supply chain from component vendors through asset owners.
ISA/IEC 62443 Series, via ISA.org ↗A short assessment conversation is often enough to tell you whether you're in good shape or exposed somewhere you didn't expect.
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