Digitalisation is rapidly transforming the way industries operate. In this constantly evolving economy, digital-driven growth empowers new business opportunities, dramatically affecting profitability by increasing productivity, effectivity, and efficiency of operations. Businesses that do not adapt to the digital environment, lose competitiveness and risk becoming obsolete.
On top of the inherent operational challenges associated with digital transformation, industrial cybersecurity has become a major obstacle facing the industry today. The journey towards industrial digitalisation introduces new cyber threats due to various reasons, the main being the structural differences between the informational (IT) and operational (OT) layers, that are becoming increasingly connected.
The convergence of IT and OT
The industrial OT environment has developed considerably over the past years, resulting in a closely coupled IT-OT convergence. More and more enterprise IT systems like ERP connect to OT management systems, used to monitor and control the industrial operations (e.g. SCADA). The two technologies have evolved in a different way over the past years and require different methods of…