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/ IT vs. OT Security: What's the Difference?

IT vs. OT Security: What's the Difference?

Exploring the unique needs, risks, and strategies for securing IT and OT

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  1. Overview
  2. What Is IT Security?
  3. What Is OT Security?
  4. Fundamental Differences
  5. Shared Threats and Challenges
  6. Unique Challenges
  7. Why IT/OT Convergence Matters
  8. The Role of Zero Trust
  9. Security Best Practices
  10. FAQs
  11. Related Topics

United they stand, divided they fall

Securing IT and OT environments is essential as organizations strive to protect their digital and physical assets. While both domains aim to prevent unauthorized access and ensure integrity, confidentiality, and availability, they take different approaches and face distinct challenges.

As organizations pursue digital transformation, a unified approach to IT and OT security consolidates and elevates protection for both environments.

What Is IT Security?

Information technology (IT) security protects IT systems, data, and networks from unauthorized access, attacks, and damage.

Goals: Detect and prevent data breaches to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IT resources.

What Is OT Security?

Operational technology (OT) security protects industrial and critical infrastructure systems from cyberthreats and unauthorized access.

Goals: Monitor and control systems to prevent disruptions that could impact physical safety or operational uptime.

IT Security vs. OT Security: Fundamental Differences

Assets Protected

IT Security

  • Endpoints (computers, servers, mobile and IoT devices, etc.)
  • Data, databases, apps, cloud services
  • Data centers, clouds, networks, routers, switches
  • User IDs, credentials, permissions
  • Communication (email, messaging, VoIP, etc.)

OT Security

  • Industrial control systems (ICS)
  • Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems
  • Programmable logic controllers (PLCs)
  • Building management systems (BMS)
  • Medical systems and healthcare infrastructure
Security Priorities

IT Security

Privacy, access control, and compliance

OT Security

Reliability, uptime, and physical safety

IT vs. OT Security: Shared Threats and Challenges

Both IT and OT environments are susceptible to many types of cyberthreats, including:

  • Malware and ransomware designed to damage, steal, or manipulate systems and data
  • Vulnerability exploits, including zero-day attacks, targeting hardware or software
  • Advanced persistent threats (APTs) that give attackers long-term access
  • Supply chain attacks that compromise third-party software or hardware

Major challenges in common across environments include:

  • Regulatory compliance mandates around data privacy and governance
  • IT/OT convergence complexity due to incompatibility between OT systems and IT security

IT vs. OT Security: Unique Challenges

Threats and Vulnerabilities

IT Security

Key threats:

  • Data breaches
  • Disruption of business-critical apps
  • Web application attacks

 

Key vulnerabilities:

  • Software exploits
  • Weak/stolen credentials
  • Excess permissions
  • Insecure endpoints

OT Security

Key threats:

  • Downtime and disruption of factories, pipelines, hospitals, etc.
  • Environmental and personnel safety

 

Key vulnerabilities:

  • Outdated/unpatchable systems
  • Limited segmentation to isolate critical systems
  • Expanded attack surface due to IT/OT convergence
Other Key Security Challenges

IT Security

  • Large attack surface due to remote work, the cloud, and mobile/IoT devices
  • Protecting data and apps across multiple clouds
  • Staff shortages and limited security budgets

OT Security

  • High uptime mandates that restrict updates
  • Poor visibility that limits monitoring of OT network
  • Proprietary protocols with inadequate security
  • Securing remote access for maintenance and monitoring
Approach to Security Controls

IT Security

  • Zero trust access from any user/device to any app
  • Full inspection of TLS-encrypted traffic
  • Data protection controls (at rest and in motion)

OT Security

  • Device segmentation
  • Privileged remote access management with governance controls
Updates and Patching

IT Security

Typically, maintenance is regularly scheduled

OT Security

High uptime requirements lead to infrequent updates

Impact of Security Incidents

IT Security

  • Compromise of data integrity, privacy, and business continuity
  • Potential for reputational and financial damage, including regulatory sanctions and fines

OT Security

  • Compromise of physical safety, production, and environmental control
  • Potential for equipment damage, operational disruption, and human health and safety risks
Network Architecture and Segmentation

IT Security

Architecture:

Often combine on-premises, cloud, hybrid infrastructures

 

Segmentation challenges:

Environments are complex, with frequent changes in devices, apps, and user access. Maintaining visibility across diverse IT systems is labor-intensive and costly without a unified solution.

OT Security

Architecture:

Often a diverse mixture of devices and protocols

 

Segmentation challenges:

Insecure legacy systems, continuity demands, diverse assets, stringent performance requirements, and limited visibility make it difficult to enforce effective policies.

IT/OT Convergence: Why It Matters

Integrating IT and OT is a major step in digital transformation, creating a more unified infrastructure that helps organizations share and manage the data and processes of both ecosystems.

By combining the strengths of IT and OT, convergence helps organizations optimize operational efficiency, reduce downtime and costs, improve issue response times, and strengthen security and resilience.

Combining real-time OT sensor data and IT analytics can enable use cases like:

  • Predictive maintenance
  • Remote monitoring and control
  • Supply chain and logistics optimization
  • Improved quality control
  • Industry 4.0 innovations

Read more: Extend Zero Trust to Your OT and IoT Security

The Role of Zero Trust in IT and OT Security

A zero trust architecture applies continuous verification and strict access controls at every level—never conferring any user, device, or application implicit trust.

Zero trust access controls ensure all entities are authenticated and authorized before they are granted access to IT and OT systems, devices, and data. This enhances the organization’s security posture, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access, lateral movement, vulnerability exploits, insider threats, and service disruption.

Ultimately, zero trust enables organizations to maintain more robust, resilient security frameworks to protect their IT and OT environments from evolving threats.

Secure your OT with zero trust

Best Practices for Managing IT and OT Security Together

  • Develop a unified security strategy that aligns security policies, procedures, and governance across IT and OT systems.
  • Implement effective segmentation to isolate IT and OT systems, minimizing the risk of lateral threat movement by attackers.
  • Deploy a cloud native zero trust architecture to enforce least-privileged access controls and ensure no entity is trusted by default.
  • Centralize security monitoring, management, and visibility with tools like security information and event management (SIEM) to detect and respond to threats in real time.
  • Conduct regular risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities and potential threats in IT and OT systems. Prioritize and address identified risks through appropriate mitigation measures.
  • Establish a robust patch management process for both IT and OT systems to quickly address vulnerabilities.
  • Implement strong access controls (e.g., multifactor authentication [MFA], single sign-on [SSO]) aligned with the principle of least privilege.
  • Ensure governance controls for third-party access into IT/OT systems (e.g. session recording, supervised access, credential vaults).
  • Create and maintain an IT/OT incident response plan. Conduct drills and simulations to ensure preparedness for potential security incidents.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

With the increased digitization and interconnection of industrial systems, OT environments are now more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Threats targeting OT systems can cause significant disruptions to physical operations, safety incidents, or damage to critical infrastructure, making OT security a top priority for organizations.

IT security prioritizes data confidentiality, emphasizing encryption, access control, and perimeter security. OT security, however, places greater emphasis on system availability, integrity, and safety, ensuring that industrial processes run continuously and safely without disruption.

Organizations can integrate IT and OT security by fostering collaboration between IT and OT teams, deploying unified visibility tools to monitor both networks, adopting a zero trust approach to access control, and investing in training to educate employees on OT-specific cybersecurity risks.