OT Incident Response Goals for 2026

Its time to get our 2026 security plan in place. This is why we are publishing a series of articles designed to help with your OT security priorities for the year 2026. Today we take a detailed look at your incident response goals for 2026.

The operational technology (OT) landscape is now evolving faster than a control loop chasing a setpoint. This evolution is driving a set of changes across the OT landscape in the form of:

· Newer compliance mandates

· Higher board and management accountability

· Increasing focus on supply chain security and

· Businesses paying more attention to employee training and awareness

As enterprises move well beyond mere perimeter defense in industrial environments, the OT security agenda for 2026 is fairly clear. For 2026, the focus isn't just on responding to an incident, but on building a system so robust that it acts proactively to shrink any opportunity for damage. This represents a fundamental pivot from "security-at-the-edge" to "resilience-at-the-core." While the environment within the perimeter gets populated with OT security solutions such as NDR, the environment outside is enriched with incident response strategies and tactics designed to ensure employee are adequately armed to detect and respond to an incident.

So here are the game-changing goals for a uniquely modern OT Incident Response (IR) program in 2026.

From mean response time (MTTR) to ensuring operational continuity (MTCID)

The oft followed traditional metric, Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), is no longer sufficient enough in a physical world where downtime impacts safety and production. Our goal has to be to shift to the new gold standard. Mean Time to Continued Industrial Operations (MTCIO), or more specifically, minimizing the Maximum Tolerable Event-Induced Disruption (MTEID) is now the metric to chase and track. The question to ask will be if enterprises have the appetite for disruption at any level or for any period of time.

• Redefine success from how fast we clean-up the (cyber) spill to how long we keep things running or how quickly we return to a fully functional state. Ask any board member or shareholder and they will tell you how important this is. Even beyond the board it is in the interest of everyone to have the shopfloor return to full operational state at the earliest.

• Actionable strategy: Implement micro-segmentation and resilient architecture (e.g., redundant/failover control systems). The IR plan must prioritize isolating the compromised system instantly to prevent lateral movement, while the critical industrial process continues on a secured segment or failover system.

AI could now be the first responder or the autonomous responder

The speed and volume of advanced, AI-driven threats such as generative AI-crafted spear-vishing targeting OT engineers will soon outstrip the human capacity to triage. In 2026, AI won't just flag threats; it will classify events and execute the initial, non-destructive response based on pre-trained playbooks.

• The goal: Achieve Autonomous Tier-1 Containment for 80 percent of identified incidents. Ensure no threat slips away or overloads security analysts

• Actionable Strategy: Integrate OT-aware Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms. These systems must be trained on OT protocols (like Modbus or DNP3) to automatically:

  • Isolate a suspicious device without shutting down the entire subnet.

  • Throttle communications from a compromised HMI or workstation.

  • Create a forensic image of the affected asset before human intervention. This makes the AI the initial containment and preservation agent.

  • Report on the steps and keep security informed about the developments and tactics

The industrial SBOM and vulnerability-by-design

OT environments are home to legacy, unpatchable systems. Some of these could be your crown jewels as well. The 2026 goal is to stop reacting to unknown vulnerabilities in installed assets and start preemptively managing risk from the supply chain up in a prioritized manner. This requires embracing the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) concept, expanding it to all components, hardware and firmware. IEC 62443 4-1 and 4-2 can serve as the guide here.

• Goal: Create a Component Bill of Materials (CBOM) for all of new critical assets and integrate it into the IR toolchain.

• Actionable Strategy: The IR plan must use the CBOM/SBOM to instantly correlate a new zero-day or CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) with every affected device in the control network. Response shifts from a manual audit to an automated risk-weighted defense deployment, giving responders the necessary information for a surgical, risk-aware response that prioritizes operational stability.

• Maintain supply chain integrity and factor it in any risk exposure and IR calculation. The IR team should be able to classify and detect the source of events.

Shift focus to the digital twin and pre-incident forensics

By the time your IR kicks in, sometimes it may be a bit late. This is why you need to have mechanisms in place to move well ahead of an event.The sheer difficulty of performing forensics on live, sensitive OT systems is a major IR bottleneck. The 2026 objective is to virtualize the investigative process.

• Goal: Develop and routinely validate "Digital Twin" Incident Response environments.

• Actionable Strategy: Build a high-fidelity virtual replica (digital twin) of the Level 1 and 2 control environment along with key environment parameters. When an incident is identified, the response team first replicates the attack on the digital twin. This allows forensic analysis, eradication testing (e.g., testing a patch or a system restart), and recovery validation in a safe, sandboxed environment, all without risking the live plant.

• Train your employees in IR in this environment

Mastering the interdependency chain

OT environments are no longer isolated; they are deeply dependent on external services, cloud-based historians, remote access vendors, and critical material supply logistics. A vendor compromise is now an operational threat.

• Goal: Integrate Third-Party Risk (TPR) and Supply Chain Security directly into the OT IR playbook.

• Actionable Strategy: The IR process must include vendor-specific playbooks. This means pre-negotiated access agreements, established communication channels, and clear contractual requirements for vendor-side incident notification. The response to an upstream supply-chain compromise must be as clear and practiced as the response to a direct-fire attack, focusing on immediate vendor access revocation and auditing their remaining connections to the plant.

Work with OEMs and other vendors

Involving OEMs and security vendors with ownership and accountability will help broad base the overall IR plan and ensure more hands on deck in case of an event.

Train beyond compliance

While training for NIS2/NERC CIP or OTCC compliance is good, the training should extend well into IR essentials and pre-cursors. Employees should be trained to detect, classify, manage and respond to events accurately while maintaining communication .

By focusing on true resilience, automation, digital modelling, and pre-emptive intelligence, OT organizations can leave the reactive, 'clean-up' approach behind and build incident response programs that protect industrial continuity in a wholistic manner in 2026.

Learn more about what went wrong at Jaguar Land Rover through the incident report.

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