Industrial OT Cybersecurity Platforms: Enabling Interoperability, Enforcement and Resilience

Industrial Cybersecurity Platforms: A Strategic Shift Toward Operational Resilience

As industrial organisations become more connected, the need to protect industrial processes from external risks has grown. In a May 2025 insight, ‘Industrial Cybersecurity Consulting and Managed Services Navigator 2025: Building Operational Resilience’, Westlands Advisory highlighted how digitalisation, regulatory pressure, and expanding attack surfaces are reshaping security priorities for operational technology (OT) environments.

Cybersecurity maturity is improving, but many asset owners still face fundamental execution challenges. This has contributed to an emerging shift from deploying isolated technical controls to building integrated security programs.

Industrial Cybersecurity Requires Platform Thinking

As industrial systems grow more connected and complex, cybersecurity is shifting from a technical discipline to a foundational business capability. The convergence of legacy OT environments with modern IT systems has created a fragmented threat surface that cannot be secured with disconnected tools or reactive responses alone. The focus is not just on detecting threats, but enforcing policy, enabling recovery, and building operational resilience across industrial operations. To do this, asset owners must adopt platform-based approaches and work with partners who can integrate, scale, and evolve with their environments.

Risk leaders should consider integrated platforms that can:

- Provide deep asset visibility without disrupting operations

- Real-time segmentation and micro-segmentation enforcement

- Remote access monitoring and control for vendors and third parties

- Integrate natively with IT and OT systems

- Support regulatory reporting, risk documentation, and response readiness

- Operate at scale across multi-vendor, multi-site environments

The value of a platform is not simply its native features, but its ability to unify processes, data, and decision-making across the organisation. This requires detection tools to integrate with NAC and firewalls for actionable enforcement. The goal is to contain incidents before they impact physical operations, without introducing operational risk. Modern platforms are built to solve this through providing seamless connectivity between cybersecurity tooling.

- Open APIs and connector libraries to unify tools and telemetry

- Support for IT-OT integration, enabling correlation with SIEM, EDR, and identity systems

- Standardised data models for consistent reporting, alerting, and risk scoring

- Support for compliance frameworks like IEC 62443, NIS2, NERC CIP

The Partner Ecosystem Matters

Technology alone cannot deliver resilience. It must be deployed, managed, and continuously optimised. As more asset owners adopt cybersecurity as a managed service, choosing the right partner is just as important as choosing the right platform.

Providers should be able to:

- Demonstrate experience across critical infrastructure sectors

- Operate with strong governance and clear service-levels

- Tailor their services to local regulatory and operational contexts

- Advise on the most appropriate platform vendors solution

- Offer end-to-end outcomes from visibility and enforcement to incident response and reporting

Platforms that support these services must be built for extensibility, enabling managed detection and response (MDR), vulnerability management, secure remote access, and compliance oversight in a cohesive and measurable way.

Building for Resilience, Not Just Compliance

Ultimately, the goal is operational resilience. Cybersecurity platforms must help asset owners answer not just ‘Are we compliant?’ but also ‘Can we withstand disruption?’, ‘Can we recover safely?’, and ‘Are we managing risk in a way that supports our core mission’.

Resilience demands shared visibility, real-time control, cross-functional coordination, and continuous improvement. That cannot be achieved with fragmented tools or disconnected teams.

The industrial cybersecurity market is moving toward integrated, enforceable, and service-ready platforms. Risk leaders should select partners and platforms that can evolve with their environments and scale with their operations.

Industrial OT Cybersecurity Platform Navigators 2025

Westlands Advisory continues to engage with the industrial community and over the last 12 months has participated in numerous briefings, presentations and strategic discussions with industrial OEMs, professional security services firms, and platform vendors. In addition, we have conducted interviews with CISOs and operational leaders to understand challenges and requirements. The work has resulted in two vendor assessments: ‘OT Visibility & Threat Management Navigator 2025’ and ‘IT/OT Network Protection Navigator 2025’.

Leaders in the ‘OT Visibility & Threat Management Navigator 2025’ include Armis, Claroty, Dragos and Nozomi. Innovators include Forescout, Fortinet, Hexagon, Industrial Defender, and Palo Alto Networks. Experts include Honeywell and Cisco.

Leaders in the ‘IT/OT Network Protection Navigator 2025’ includes Cisco, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. Innovators include TXOne Networks.

Note: Analysis was conducted between September 2024 and June 2025 and involved close to 100 briefings and interviews with service providers, vendors, and asset owners.

www.westlandsadvisory.com/insights/industrial-cybersecurity-consulting-and-managed-services-navigator-2025-building-operational-resilience

www.westlandsadvisory.com/insights/industrial-digital-transformation-continues-to-outpace-growing-investment-in-ot-cybersecurity