Simplifying industrial cybersecurity in 2025
07 February 2025
Advancing in digitalisation without considering business continuity and disaster recovery as a vital step will hinder transformation efforts.
As we start another year, cybersecurity should be at the forefront of digital transformation plans, and for good reason. Statistics released in 2024 show a global increase of 25.7 percent in cyberattacks for manufacturing alone.
The National Cyber Security Centre 2024 Annual Review states that the threat to the UK’s critical water, wastewater and energy infrastructure is ‘enduring and significant’.
These statistics prove the importance of prioritising cyber resilience across the broad spectrum of industrial sectors and strengthening defences alongside digitalisation progress to maintain business continuity.
Cyber resilience is no longer a reactive measure, and it extends beyond traditional cybersecurity by emphasising a business’ ability to continue operating and recover quickly after a cyberattack.
Where traditional cybersecurity primarily looks to prevent breaches, cyber resilience maintains core operations even during an active cyber-attack.
Data visibility = cyber resilience
Best practice for disaster recover involves putting a plan in place covering digital capabilities and data visibility. This plan will support consistent operations for industrial businesses of any size:
1. Risk assessment
While not new to industrial enterprises, risk assessments must be consistent and always evolving to meet new cyber threats. New vulnerabilities are found every day, so repeating the same risk assessment won’t alert these to operators. Robust risk assessments must adapt to the constantly changing threat landscape, requiring active research from a dedicated team.
2. Asset identification
Understanding your most critical asset and their security posture is key to establishing the effort and controls that are necessary to provide cyber resilience. The abundance of legacy assets, now in a highly connected world, makes defending these a challenging, if not impossible, task. Where protection is not possible or feasible, redundancy, isolation and recovery become more important than protection.
3. Redundancy and segregation
Availability drives automation, protecting systems through segregation creates isolation zones between processes, allowing them to continue when others around them have been compromised. Critical systems should have built-in redundancy at the hardware and software level to deliver availability during periods of maintenance and unplanned downtime.
4. Automated threat detection and backups
Regular backups and redundant systems ensure critical data is not lost and can be quickly restored. These should already be part of any cybersecurity strategy. Adding advanced and automated threat detection will flag irregularities and send alerts to operators.
Digital transformation uses data-driven insights to empower operators to make informed decisions and a cyber resilience strategy must work the same way.
5. Skills/training
As cyber threats are always evolving, operators need the skills and knowledge to address them. Simultaneously, there is a growing skills gap within industry that includes those fundamental cyber skills. Simple check-box training exercises covering the basics of cyber security during employee onboarding will no longer suffice.
Like all digital transformation capabilities, businesses that want to ensure cyber resilience should commit to continuous learning or seek a partner organisation with dedicated expertise to share the responsibility.
Each of these five best practices will prepare industrial businesses against cyber threats but rely on complete data visibility. Data visibility means that risk assessment, high availability, threat detection, and most importantly response are based on real-time information, only then can issues be solved before they escalate.
Data visibility across OT devices also offers a way to flag inconsistencies or irregular behaviours that could potentially be security risks. During and after an incident that same visibility will enable operators to understand how an attack occurred, which systems were affected, and how best to recover.
Industrial businesses are part of increasingly complex supply chains, and every new element brings another potential cybersecurity risk.
Data visibility that extends across technology providers and connected partners can potentially reduce the risk of threats spreading across interconnected systems.
Cyber attackers may even look to exploit weaknesses in the supply chain as an entry to an intended target, making cyber resilience a responsibility for everyone.
Simplified cybersecurity
Cyber resilience can be complex, adding a host of new tasks to the already-busy operator without adding new dedicated members to the workforce. However, digitalisation provides a balance by providing data and insight to cut repetitive tasks and improve decision-making.
By collaborating with a dedicated industrial cybersecurity partner, the necessary skills can be brought into the workforce to support operators and stay ahead of constantly changing threats.
This moves cybersecurity from being a solution deployment to an ongoing cyber resilience strategy, one that better prepares any industrial organisation against future threats and secures operations as the supply chain grows.
Cyber resilience should be the lead focus for cybersecurity efforts in 2025. With attacks increasing across all industrial sectors and of all sizes, all businesses are at risk.
Cyber resilience ensures that even when an attack occurs, core operations can remain safe and stable while recovery is swift.
One way to do this is choosing a complete industrial cybersecurity partner, such as SolutionsPT, who removes the complexity and fortifies operations in today’s industrial landscape.
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