OT Cybersecurity FAQs

Operational technology (OT) refers to the hardware and software that controls or monitors assets used to automate physical processes. In doing so, it collects a wealth of information about the assets and processes it monitors that is useful for detecting important changes, both anomalies from the baseline and cybersecurity threats.

Learn how IT and OT security differ in priorities, threats, and strategies for critical infrastructure.

Many basic cybersecurity practices carry over from IT to OT, with greater emphasis in areas such as segmentation and continuous monitoring to compensate for infrequent patching opportunities.

Learn what IT/OT convergence is, why it matters, and how to secure converged industrial environments.

When calculating OT risk you must factor in not just vulnerabilities but vulnerability risk, alert risk, communication risk, device risk, asset criticality and compensating controls. You can then prioritize mitigation based on asset exposure, likelihood of compromise, potential impact and organization risk tolerance.

IT endpoint security agents don’t work in OT because they’re heavyweight and disruptive, can’t understand OT/IoT protocols and aren’t trained on OT environments, so they detect the wrong threats.

Comprehensive risk management in OT environments requires both signature-based threat detection and AI-powered behavior-based anomaly detection techniques to uncover known cyber threats as well as operational anomalies and zero-days.

See why industrial environments rely on passive monitoring, and where active querying and endpoint agents step in.

Because of their ability to rapidly analyze and correlate data at scale, AI and ML are accelerating nearly every aspect of cyber defense including asset inventory and intelligence, behavior baselining, anomaly and threat detection, event correlation, risk prioritization and noise reduction.

Regardless of who owns the budget, the ideal OT security team includes plant managers, engineers, operators, cybersecurity analysts, network managers and system administrators working together to purchase the right solutions, ensure successful adoption and manage ongoing maintenance.

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system is which digital networks and physical systems are tightly connected. Gartner began using the term in 2022, and in 2025 published its first Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPS Protection Platforms, where Nozomi Networks is named a Leader.