Series Overview
Critical infrastructure has long been dependent on operational technology (OT) to manage and operate processes across key industries like energy, water and manufacturing, and the resilience of these processes is essential to a safe and stable economy.
Cyber has become a demonstrable threat to system resilience and many cyber guidelines advocate active management and change (e.g. patching) in response to this volatile threat. However recent events have illustrated how sudden change can have unintended consequences (e.g. Blue Screen of Death in control rooms), which raises concerns when aged platforms are often intolerant of rapid change.
As we embrace the future many of these industries have a growing landscape of distributed technology given the growth of smarter devices (e.g. field sensors), renewable energy assets (e.g. wind farms) and consumer energy devices (e.g. EV chargers, batteries, solar inverters), and a growing dependency on external data such as weather to make operational decisions.
In this new era few organisations can rely on the historical approach of total isolation, especially given how operational efficiency and capabilities such as AI inherently need connectivity. This creates a nuanced and dynamic risk position to manage.
