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For manufacturers looking to improve both cybersecurity maturity and compliance outcomes, the biggest gains often come from being open to new technologies, approaches, and collaboration. While we can try to converge IT and OT security techniques and adopt firewalls, endpoint tools, and VPNs to secure OT environments, we quickly run into new challenges. These technologies do not account for industrial processes or safety requirements and can interfere with process operations. One emerging theme across these efforts is the adoption of Universal Zero Trust Network Access( UZTNA) principles, a unified approach that applies Zero Trust principles consistently across users, devices, and applications spanning IT and operational environments. It takes into account the different requirements of legacy and modern devices and applies riskand context-based controls to protect unpatchable and outdated systems. UZTNA allows controlled vendor access and is critical for containing new threats.
This becomes even more important in a post-Mythos world, where AI-driven testing and autonomous discovery are accelerating how quickly vulnerabilities are uncovered, particularly in legacy OT devices that have historically received far less scrutiny than traditional IT systems.
The hidden complexity of manufacturing security
Manufacturing environments are among the most complex environments to secure. Industrial control systems, legacy equipment, IoT devices, cloud platforms, and corporate IT networks all coexist, often with decades of accumulated technology.
Many organizations have responded to rising cyber risk by adding layers of security tooling and are now operating dozens of
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