Multi-Vendor Firewalls in OT Networks: Benefits, Risks, and Best Practices

This Dragos analysis reviews recent OT incident-response cases where reliance on a single, vulnerable firewall vendor led to widespread compromises, highlights perimeter device exploitation (firewalls and VPN concentrators) and delayed OT patching as key risk drivers, and evaluates multi-vendor firewall deployments as a defense-in-depth option—recommending them only for well-resourced organizations with capabilities for timely updates, tuning, and monitoring.