The events of 2020 accelerated many organizations’ efforts to converge their information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments. Now that they’re immersed in this journey, some organizations are finding that it’s not quite as smooth as they were expecting. They’re learning that they need to overcome several challenges if they hope to leverage the IT-OT convergence as part of their ongoing digital transformations.

That raises some important questions. What challenges are organizations meeting along the way? Are there some that tend to pop up across different organizations?

To find out, the State of Security worked with Belden and decided to ask a group of security experts about some of the key obstacles facing IT and OT. Their responses are provided below.

Alex Bagwell | Vice President of Industrial Sales at Tripwire

The biggest challenges that we are seeing with IT-OT convergence is how to consolidate overlapping solutions across multiple business units within seemingly separate IT and OT networks. CISOs have historically focused on their IT networks, investing heavily into security solutions that give them full visibility of what is going on inside their domain. Now that operational technology is being inherited by the CISO or being forced to the forefront by the Board and United States Government, that CISO is looking for ways to reduce the number of tools but also to maintain the same IT familiarity with their OT environments.  

Additionally, there is a very careful dance that must be done to get buy-in from the OT teams to allow for IT integrations or solution deployment. Plant shutdowns are a real concern for OT manufacturing owners, as they can quickly become costly or impact their overall production metrics. This is typically driven around the notion that if a solution is put in place, it could cause a (Read more...)