By
Andrew Collins
Research Fellow, OT Architecture and Operations
Mary 3, 2026
One of the most persistent and consequential vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and industrial environments is also one of the least visible to leadership: the absence of comprehensive awareness of what operational technology assets exist, how they are connected, and what is happening within them at any given time.
This is not a theoretical problem. Organizations routinely discover operational technology assets during incident response that their security and engineering teams did not know were network-connected. Control system components communicate with external destinations that operations leadership never authorized. Legacy devices operate within production networks long after they were believed to have been decommissioned. The implications of these visibility gaps, in an environment where adversaries are actively targeting industrial systems, are significant.
Why OT Environments Are Difficult to See
Operational technology environments were not designed with security monitoring in mind. Many industrial control systems, programmable logic controllers, and field devices operate on proprietary protocols that standard IT security tools cannot interpret. Asset inventories, where they exist, are frequently maintained manually and are out of date. The operational sensitivity of production environments creates legitimate reluctance to deploy monitoring tools that could interfere with system performance.
The result is that many organizations have substantially less visibility into their operational technology environments than they believe, and considerably less than the threat environment demands.
What Adversaries Understand That Leaders Often Do Not
Sophisticated adversaries targeting critical infrastructure invest significant effort in understanding the operational technology environments they seek to compromise, often developing more detailed knowledge of a target’s industrial systems than the target’s own leadership possesses. This asymmetry is a strategic vulnerability.
Nation-state actors conducting long-term infrastructure reconnaissance are not looking for quick financial returns. They are mapping systems, understanding operational dependencies, and positioning for disruption at a time of their choosing. An organization without visibility into its own OT environment has no reliable mechanism for detecting this activity.
Building Operational Awareness
Improving OT visibility does not require organizations to compromise operational stability. Passive monitoring approaches that observe network traffic without interacting with control systems are increasingly mature and widely deployed in industrial environments. Asset discovery tools designed for OT protocols can produce accurate inventories without disrupting production. These capabilities, combined with defined processes for investigating anomalies and clear escalation paths, form the foundation of meaningful OT security awareness.
The organizational challenge is often less technical than it is structural. Establishing clear ownership for OT security monitoring, defining the relationship between IT security teams and operational engineering functions, and allocating resources adequate to the scale of the environment are governance decisions that precede any technology investment.
Leadership that cannot answer basic questions about what is connected to their operational technology networks, and what normal behavior in those networks looks like, is operating without the situational awareness that effective risk management requires.
