Why 80% of CISOs Still Don’t Have a Clear Risk Picture in OT Environments (UDV Expert View)
The uncomfortable truth: OT is still a blind zone
Most CISOs understand their IT risk posture with confidence. But once the discussion moves into operational technology, clarity disappears. Not because organizations lack tools, but because OT environments were never engineered for visibility or security monitoring. This structural limitation is a consistent pattern across UDV’s OT security assessments and remains one of the biggest barriers to improving OT security risk visibility.
OT wasn’t designed for security visibility
Entering an OT environment quickly reveals the absence of fundamental security elements: telemetry, logs, inventories, version history, and documentation.
Common findings during OT assessments include:
• assets with no information on installation date
• devices unpatched for 10 -15 years
• vendor equipment lacking monitoring capabilities
• undocumented and temporary network paths
• systems that fail under standard scanning methods
You cannot assess OT security risk in a system you are unable to observe.
IT methods fail because OT behaves differently
IT security assumes the ability to identify assets, scan them, analyze behavior, and apply updates. In OT security, these steps follow different rules:
• Industrial scanning can interrupt production processes
• A critical vulnerability may have little real-world impact on physical operations
• Many PLCs and controllers provide no telemetry at all
• Patching often requires rare and planned downtime
When IT risk models are applied to OT environments, they create a misleading sense of confidence – visibility without accuracy – which is the most dangerous form of OT security risk visibility gap.
OT risk follows physical rules, not digital ones
In OT, the fundamental question is simple: “What breaks if this device stops working?”
Risk is evaluated through:
• disruption of industrial operations
• safety implications
• equipment failure or damage
• production delays
• recovery time and associated cost
Traditional IT scoring models fail because they do not account for how deeply the physical process relies on each asset.
The real barrier: IT and OT speak different languages
The challenge is not only technical – it is cultural. OT teams focus on uptime, sometimes at all costs. IT teams focus on visibility, control, and governance.
This misalignment leads to:
• partial or fragmented asset inventories
• unclear ownership of risks
• critical details never reaching the CISO
• decisions made without shared operational context
Until IT and OT align, CISOs will continue to receive incomplete or distorted OT security risk visibility.
What a real OT risk picture must include
Effective OT risk visibility is not about adding more dashboards – it requires structured understanding of the environment.
A CISO needs visibility into:
- Verified asset inventory
- Process-level dependencies
- Clarity on what can and cannot be monitored
- Risk scoring based on operational impact
- Unified governance across IT and OT
Once these components are established, OT risk becomes measurable, actionable, and manageable.
