Only a small minority of industrial organizations feel truly ready for emerging OT cyber threats, with surveys showing that most still struggle to reconcile IT-style security practices with the reliability, safety, and uptime priorities of plant operations. The result is a widening OT cybersecurity culture gap: security teams talk in terms of risk, data, and compliance, while operators think in terms of production, safety incidents, and costly downtime that can average tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Regulations and standards are tightening, yet many facilities still fail audits because they lack resources or cannot implement advanced controls on legacy systems. Geopolitical tensions and state-linked threats have pushed OT cyber risk into the realm of national and economic security, making supply chain exposure, vendor access, and remote maintenance pathways critical points of concern. At the same time, exploding connectivity through IIoT, cloud, and AI increases exposure, forcing organizations to rethink connectivity strategies, adopt zero trust principles, and prepare for post-quantum realities without undermining plant reliability.

Industry leaders argue that closing this gap depends less on new technology and more on changing how people work together. Trust grows when cybersecurity staff adopt an operations mindset, spend time on the plant floor, and frame cyber issues in business terms like financial impact, safety consequences, and uptime. Shared goals, joint KPIs, and practical mechanisms such as cross-training, integrated incident exercises, and co-owned tools—asset inventories, CMDBs, monitoring platforms—create a single source of truth that serves both reliability and security. Boards respond best when cyber risk is quantified in familiar concepts like Value at Risk and tied to real scenarios, not technical jargon. Modern OT security programs increasingly treat cyber as one dimension of overall operational resilience, embedded alongside safety and reliability rather than bolted on for compliance. As connectivity and interdependence grow, the most resilient organizations are those that build integrated IT–OT governance, involve vendors and engineers in regular risk reviews, and make cybersecurity “invisible” during normal operations but fully effective when incidents strike.

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Source: https://industrialcyber.co/threats-attacks/ot-cybersecurity-faces-widening-culture-gap-as-organizations-struggle-to-keep-pace-with-emerging-threats/