Managing Cyber Risk, Readiness, and Resilience

As digital transformation continues to bring dramatic change to industry systems and technology, the Manufacturers Alliance, in partnership with Fortinet, surveyed leaders in operational technology (OT) security at large manufacturers to understand practices to protect critical infrastructure.

The study focused on sizing OT cybersecurity risk, assessing incidents and response readiness, and reducing risks by understanding how to build resilience amid IT/OT convergence. Key findings include:

1. A TOP-FIVE BUSINESS RISK 
   OT cybersecurity is seeing leadership and engagement spanning from the C-suite to the production environment. Although more than 80% of respondents expect their budgets to secure OT infrastructure to increase in the next 12 months, only 27% say the expected increase is significant.
    
2. REAL AND PRESENT DANGER 
   Three in five manufacturers experienced actual breaches with unauthorized access to data in the past 12 months. Of those incidents, 42% resulted in operational outages with lost productivity.
    
3. “ABOVE AVERAGE” CONFIDENCE 
   While leaders believe IT/OT convergence is critical to competitiveness, self-assessments reveal likely blind spots to complex threats.
    
4. ALL-IN ON PREVENTION (ALMOST) 
   73% performed a cyber-risk audit and/or assessment of OT cybersecurity in the past 12 months. Three in five rate incidence response planning as extremely important; and two-thirds will be improving Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition or Industrial Control Systems (SCADA or ICS) security in the next year by focusing efforts on prevention/protection. 
    
5. UNEVEN APPROACHES TO EVERGREEN CHALLENGES 
   Despite consensus on attack surface expansion and shared management challenges responding to these attacks, there remains high variability in company security practices and capabilities, including activities for monitoring and reporting.

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Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers its customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network—today and into the future.

For more information, visit fortinet.com.