New Data Sheds Light on Industrial Cybersecurity Maturity and Blockers

The 2021 State of Industrial Cybersecurity report summarizes a Ponemon/Dragos survey of 603 U.S. IT, IT security, and OT practitioners, finding that half of organizations report optimism about ICS/OT program maturity while many still lack expertise, alignment, and clear ownership for OT security. Key issues include OT managed by engineering teams without security skills or by IT teams lacking OT domain knowledge, cultural and technical divides between IT and OT, and insufficient executive-level reporting; recommended actions are to form cross-functional IT/OT teams, create OT cybersecurity roadmaps, invest in appropriate tools, and build specialized skills to improve resilience.