Industrial Cybersecurity Consulting and Managed Services Navigator 2025: Building Operational Resilience
Building Operational Resilience
Operational Technology (OT) environments are foundational to critical infrastructure and industrial operations. These systems control physical processes essential to energy, transport, manufacturing, and public services. As connectivity increases, so does exposure to cyber, physical, and operational risks. Yet, despite the criticality of these processes, cyber maturity remains relatively low, with significant obstacles to accelerating improvements in cyber resilience.
The conversation related to OT cybersecurity is shifting from a discussion that is solely about stopping threats to ensuring operations can withstand disruption and recover quickly. The World Economic Forum’s Unpacking Cyber Resilience report (November 2024) frames this well:
“Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to minimize the impact of significant cyber incidents on its primary goals and objectives.”
Building resilient operations takes time and requires the alignment of people, processes, and technology across often complex and distributed sites. As a result, asset owners increasingly need the expertise that security consulting and managed services organisations can offer, bringing the technical knowledge, understanding of operational risk, and transformation skills needed to help move towards a more resilient operating model.
Four Market Forces Driving the Shift to Resilience
Investment in OT cybersecurity consulting and managed services doubled between 2020 and 2024. Four forces – digital transformation, systemic risk, regulation, and service driven business models – all contributed to the growth, either pushing or enabling organisations to embed cybersecurity into enterprise risk governance and build the measurable capabilities needed to maintain operations, respond to incidents, and recover quickly.
1. Digital Transformation and Expanding Operational Boundaries
The integration of OT with enterprise IT, cloud analytics, private 5G, and edge devices is redefining industrial operations but also creating new attack surfaces. Secure segmentation, access control, and scalable governance are essential.
2. Systemic Risk
Cyber threats are difficult to contain. Adversaries exploit the increasing interdependence between IT, OT, cloud platforms, third-party services, and even physical operations. Incidents, whether intentional or unintentional, can originate in one part of the ecosystem – such as a compromised contractor or exposed IT asset – and cascade across systems with operational impact. In this environment, organisations can no longer focus solely on preventing every incident. The priority must shift toward limiting the blast radius, maintaining safe operations under pressure, and enabling rapid, coordinated recovery across domains.
3. Regulatory Pressures Elevating Expectations
As critical infrastructure has become a focus of national security, governments and regulators have strengthened existing regulations and introduced new ones, shifting from broad guidance to specific, enforceable obligations. They require governance models, incident preparedness, cross-border alignment, and evidence of continuous improvement – all core pillars of a resilience-driven approach.
4. Service Centric Business Models
One of the most significant shifts in the OT cybersecurity market is the growth of service-centric business models. Rather than purchasing standalone tools or commissioning periodic consulting engagements, asset owners are increasingly consuming cybersecurity as an ongoing service that is structured, measurable, and aligned to resilience outcomes. In practice, this means organisations are not just outsourcing tasks like vulnerability scanning or remote access management but are engaging providers to deliver end-to-end capabilities, including maintaining response readiness, managing third-party access across industrial estates, embedding security into engineering projects, and correlating threats across IT and OT.
This model is being accelerated by the evolution of underlying tools and platforms. For example, cloud-based landing zones offer pre-integrated, policy-compliant environments that reduce deployment time and complexity across distributed OT estates. Generative AI and automation are helping providers scale expertise, supporting faster incident analysis, alert summarisation, policy creation, and executive reporting.
Towards Service-Centric Security Models
OT security services are shifting in response to the four market forces and persistent asset owner challenges which includes developing a business case for resilience, assigning ownership, and aligning internal resources, and maintaining a compliant operation. Asset owners are moving from isolated deployments to outcome-based engagements. The right partners help asset owners navigate this complexity and deliver capabilities aligned to operational continuity.
1. Visibility and prioritisation: Clear understanding and management of assets, dependencies, and risks – especially for the most critical systems.
2. Layered protection: Segmentation, remote access controls, endpoint hardening, and perimeter enforcement to limit exposure and contain spread.
3. Integrated governance and decision-making: Defined roles, shared policies, and cross-functional coordination and collaboration between engineering, security, operations, and executive leadership.
4. Managed Security Operations: SOC delivery models based on ongoing monitoring, management, and threat containment with a focus on maintaining safe and continuous operations.
5. Incident response and recovery readiness: Playbooks, tested procedures, offline backups, and clear escalation pathways that reflect the realities of industrial operations.
6. Sustained maturity through lifecycle integration: Security embedded into procurement, engineering design, transformation initiatives, and ongoing risk management.
Industrial Security Consulting and Managed Services Navigator 2025
Westlands Advisory’s Industrial Security Consulting and Managed Services Navigator 2025 assesses the capability and strategic direction of leading service providers who have the OT experience and credentials to support asset owners. The service helps asset owners to evaluate leading service provides, outlining capabilities and relative strengths.
Leaders in the 2025 Navigator are Accenture, Deloitte, EY, Honeywell, IBM, PwC, Rockwell Automation, and Siemens. Innovators are 1898 & Co., DNV Cyber and NTT.
Asset owners that would like insight into the Leaders, Innovators, Experts and Others, should contact Westlands Advisory for a courtesy briefing.
Note: Analysis was conducted between September 2024 and April 2025 and involved over 70 briefings and interviews with service providers, vendors, and asset owners.