As the year comes to a close, many industrial organizations take stock of where they are—and where they want to be next. For OT security and compliance teams, that reflection is rarely about starting from scratch. More often, it’s about doing what you already do more effectively, more efficiently, and at greater scale.
With that in mind, here’s a New Year’s–style countdown, highlighting ten practical, high-value things teams can do with the Industrial Defender platform to mature their OT cybersecurity and compliance programs in the year ahead. Each step builds toward stronger visibility, better decision-making, and defensible compliance across frameworks like NERC CIP, NIS2, Saudi OTCC, and other OT-focused standards.
The foundation of every effective OT security or compliance program is knowing what you have. Not just device names, but what each asset is, what it runs, how it’s configured, and why it matters operationally.
Using Industrial Defender to centralize OT asset inventory—across sites, zones, and vendors—helps teams move beyond spreadsheets and static lists. More importantly, it establishes a living system of record that stays relevant as environments evolve.
Asset data is only valuable if it’s usable by more than one group. Security teams, compliance teams, and operations all ask different questions, but they should be working from the same underlying truth.
Industrial Defender enables teams to apply consistent asset context, such as criticality, ownership, function, and location, across use cases. That shared understanding reduces friction, speeds analysis, and avoids the “multiple sources of truth” problem that slows audits and incident response alike.
In OT environments, most incidents don’t start with some new groundbreaking malware. They start with change. Without a baseline, it’s impossible to know whether a configuration is expected, drifted, or outright risky.
By establishing configuration baselines for OT assets, Industrial Defender helps teams clearly define what “good” looks like. That baseline becomes the reference point for detecting drift, validating changes, and supporting compliance controls that require configuration integrity.
Once baselines exist, changes stop being ambiguous. Industrial Defender allows teams to identify what changed, when it changed, and exactly how it differs from the approved state.
This capability supports faster troubleshooting, reduced mean time to resolution, and stronger evidence for compliance requirements tied to configuration management and change control. Instead of guessing whether a change matters, teams can focus on the ones that actually do.
Most OT teams are overwhelmed by vulnerability data. Long lists, limited resources, and little clarity on what actually creates risk.
Industrial Defender enables risk-based vulnerability management by tying vulnerabilities to real OT assets, configurations, and operational roles. This allows teams to move from “what exists” to “what matters,” aligning remediation efforts with both security impact and operational constraints.
Perimeter defenses alone are not sufficient. Modern compliance expectations and real-world threat models assume that some activity will occur inside trusted zones.
Industrial Defender supports internal security monitoring using intrusion detection, firewall activity analysis, and log and event monitoring, all enriched with asset-level context. Alerts become more actionable because teams understand which asset is involved and why it matters, not just that something happened.
Raw alerts without context slow teams down. When every event looks equally urgent, nothing is.
By correlating detections to known OT assets, their configurations, and their role in operations, Industrial Defender helps teams reduce false positives and focus attention where it’s warranted. This improves analyst efficiency and supports a more sustainable security monitoring model.
Compliance shouldn’t require a scramble every audit cycle. The work teams do throughout the year (e.g. monitoring, reviewing changes, tracking vulnerabilities) should naturally produce evidence.
Industrial Defender captures and retains historical data in a way that aligns operational activity with compliance expectations. This makes it easier to demonstrate adherence to requirements across NERC CIP, NIS2, OTCC, and similar frameworks without re-creating evidence after the fact.
As programs grow, inconsistency becomes risk. Different sites doing similar work in different ways creates gaps, inefficiencies, and audit exposure.
Industrial Defender enables organizations to apply consistent processes and controls across facilities while still respecting local operational realities. That scalability is critical for organizations managing multiple regulatory regimes or expanding OT security coverage year over year.
The most impactful outcome isn’t any single feature, it’s what they enable together.
By combining deep OT asset visibility, configuration integrity, risk-based vulnerability management, internal security monitoring, and audit-ready reporting, Industrial Defender helps teams move from reactive tasks to a mature, defensible, and continuously improving program.
That’s what positions organizations to meet today’s requirements and adapt to what comes next, without starting over every year.
If your organization is already using Industrial Defender, the new year is an opportunity to mature how you use it—connecting capabilities, scaling impact, and reducing friction across security and compliance.
If you’re just getting started, there’s no better time to establish a foundation built for real OT environments.
Connect with us to get started—or to take your OT cybersecurity and compliance program to the next level with Industrial Defender.
We extend our best wishes to the teams who design, operate, secure, and support the industrial systems that underpin modern life. Power, water, fuel, manufacturing, and transportation all depend on your expertise and commitment.
Continued advancement in OT cybersecurity plays an important role in enabling critical infrastructure to operate safely, reliably, and at scale. As organizations strengthen visibility, improve security practices, and align more closely with compliance requirements, industrial environments are better positioned to support the essential services communities rely on every day.
Here’s to a new year focused on progress, resilience, and the ongoing work of securing and sustaining critical infrastructure.
