Secomea’s 2026 report found a major gap between what industrial organizations think they control and what they can actually prove when it comes to remote access. Many companies believe they have good visibility into who is connecting to their OT systems and feel confident about compliance, but the report says that confidence is often too high. A big reason is vendor sprawl: companies still rely on a messy mix of VPNs, OEM remote tools, privileged access products, and newer OT-specific platforms. That creates inconsistent logs, overlapping access paths, and blind spots—especially when outside vendors use their own tools. The report says vendor access is now one of the biggest risk areas in industrial environments, and incident risk rises sharply when there are many vendors, weak credentials, and only partial session visibility.

Its main recommendation is to move toward a more unified, identity-based remote access model with shared IT/OT governance. The report says the strongest-performing organizations centralize policy, visibility, and approval workflows, while still allowing vendors controlled access to do support work. It also says Zero Trust adoption consistently improves outcomes: better visibility, faster but safer vendor access, stronger oversight, and fewer incidents. In practical terms, the article argues that companies should reduce the number of access tools, eliminate shared and long-lived credentials, require strong identity checks, use time-limited access, and record sessions by default. The overall message is that industrial remote access should be treated as a core operational capability—not just an IT convenience—because it directly affects security, uptime, and compliance.

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Source: https://industrialcyber.co/reports/secomeas-state-of-industrial-remote-access-2026-reveals-vendor-sprawl-and-weak-credentials-undermining-ot-security/