Prayukth KV
September 17, 2025
How to choose the best OT Security Platform for your industrial operations
Choosing an OT security platform is not just an important decision, but it can be a time consuming one as well. A wrong move, like an aggressive vulnerability scan, could halt a production line, causing significant financial and safety repercussions. Selecting an OT security platform requires a different set of criteria. On paper vendors will claim a lot which is why it is essential to identify features that are important to your operations and security goals.
In today’s blog post we help you choose an OT security platform that fits your organization's unique needs.
Foundational capabilities: Asset inventory and vulnerability management
Before you can secure anything, you have to know what you have. A robust OT security platform must provide a comprehensive and accurate asset inventory. This goes beyond just a list of devices. It needs to provide deep, contextual information about each asset.
Deep asset context: The platform should identify not only the device's IP and MAC addresses but also its manufacturer, model, firmware version, and its specific role in the industrial process (e.g., PLC, HMI, VFD). It should also map the relationships and communication pathways between these assets. This is often achieved through passive monitoring of network traffic, which is a non-intrusive method ideal for sensitive OT environments.
Protocol coverage: The OT security platform should be able to offer maximum coverage of OT security protocols to facilitate asset detection. This includes the ability to detect assets that are running on new protocols.
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management: Once assets are identified, the platform must pinpoint vulnerabilities. However, unlike in IT, where you might patch everything immediately, OT requires a nuanced, risk-based approach. The platform should prioritize vulnerabilities based on several factors:
Asset Criticality: How important is this device to the operation? A vulnerability on a critical safety system is a much higher priority than one on a less critical monitoring station.
Exploitability: Is the vulnerability actively being exploited in the wild?
Potential Impact: What would be the consequence of a successful exploit? (e.g., production shutdown, safety incident, environmental damage).
The platform should provide actionable remediation plans (and facilitate deployment of such plans as well), such as compensatory controls (e.g., network segmentation) to mitigate risk for assets that cannot be patched immediately due to operational constraints.
Granular security posture and compliance
Your security platform should do more than just list vulnerabilities; it should provide a holistic view of your security posture. This means the ability to continuously monitor and assess the state of your OT environment against established security frameworks and internal policies.
Mapping to OT Standards: A strong platform will be able to map your security posture to key industry standards and regulations like IEC 62443, NIS2 NIST, and NERC CIP. This is critical for organizations that must adhere to strict compliance requirements. It should provide automated reports and dashboards that demonstrate your compliance status, making audits much easier.
Micro-Segmentation and Policy Enforcement: The platform should support micro-segmentation by providing the data needed to create and enforce granular network policies. This allows you to isolate critical assets or zones, so a breach in one area doesn't spread throughout the entire network. Look for a solution that can automatically generate firewall rules based on observed traffic patterns, reducing manual configuration and the chance of errors.
Agentic AI with granular control
Does the solution have an agentic AI tool that automatically calibrates your security posture during different scenarios of operation such as maintenance windows, peak operations and regular operations? If not, then it is time to consider a new OT security platform.
With an agentic AI-powered solution such as Shieldworkz, you will be able to focus on more important aspects such as vetted alerts, multiple-level of triaging, first level of incident response, recommend compensatory controls, policy implementation and any other security or operational aspect you want to focus on. This also frees up your resources and allows you to overcome the need to have a large OT security team. The agentic AI backed platform should be able to serve as security analyst, first responder and help in deploying security measures recommended during the last round of OT security assessment.
SOC Readiness and integrations
An OT security platform doesn't operate in a vacuum. It must integrate seamlessly into your broader security ecosystem, including your IT systems and your Security Operations Center (SOC).
IT/OT Convergence: The platform should be designed to support the convergence of IT and OT security. It must integrate with IT security tools like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems (e.g., Splunk, IBM QRadar) and ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow). This ensures that OT alerts are not siloed and can be correlated with IT security events, providing a unified view of threats.
Actionable Intelligence for the SOC: The platform should provide context-rich alerts that are easily understood by SOC analysts, who may not have an OT background. An alert that simply says "malicious traffic detected" is not helpful. A good platform will enrich the alert with details like the specific asset involved, its criticality, the type of protocol used, and the potential impact of the event. This enables the SOC to respond rapidly and effectively.
It should support and drive the implementation of your SOC strategy
Contextual threat intelligence
The OT security platform should be backed by threat intelligence specific to the context of the OT operator with additional enrichment through OT specific threat intelligence gathering infrastructure. Without OT specific threat intelligence, the platform may miss OT threats all together.
Minimizing false positives
Nothing drains a security team's resources and leads to alert fatigue like a constant stream of false positives. In OT, this is particularly critical, as it can lead to legitimate threats being ignored.
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): The platform should use Deep Packet Inspection to understand the specific protocols used in industrial communications (e.g., Modbus, DNP3, Ethernet/IP). By understanding the context of these communications, the platform can differentiate between legitimate operational commands and potentially malicious activity, drastically reducing false positives.
Behavioral Anomaly Detection: Instead of just relying on signature-based detection, a quality platform will use behavioral anomaly detection and machine learning to create a baseline of "normal" behavior for your OT network. Any deviation from this baseline, such as an unusual command to a PLC or a new device appearing on the network, will trigger an alert, but only if it deviates from the learned, trusted behavior.
By carefully considering these aspects, you can choose an OT security platform that provides robust protection without compromising the operational integrity of your critical systems. The best way of testing these capabilities is to go for a proof-of-concept project with the vendor. All vendors will claim to deliver moondust on a platter while pitching their OT security solution but only the right vendor will make it through a PoC and deliver results on the field.
Lastly, the right platform will be a true partner in your security journey, helping you to build a resilient and secure OT environment.
Learn how Shieldworkz OT security platform is best suited for protecting your OT security environment. Try us out through a PoC on your terms and you will see the difference.
