Stop managing risk in silos. VM-Native OT Discovery, now available in Tenable Vulnerability Management and Tenable Security Center provides unified visibility across IT and OT domains. See every asset and manage your total cyber exposure in a unified view.
Key takeaways
- The air gap is dead. IT security teams are inheriting responsibility for operational technology (OT), but often lack visibility into these systems.
- Security teams face significant barriers with OT security. Fear of disrupting fragile devices and the high cost of specialized hardware have created a dangerous “black box” in the attack surface.
- The perfect “on-ramp” to OT security. A new OT Discovery engine embedded in Tenable Vulnerability Management and Tenable Security Center allows security teams to safely profile OT, IoT, and shadow IT assets using the tools they already own.
For decades, the concept of the “air gap” — a physical isolation between IT networks and critical operational technology (OT) — provided security leaders with a sense of comfort. The assumption was simple. Digital threats stay on the corporate network, while physical operations run safely in isolation.
In today’s hyper-connected world, that assumption is often wrong and leaves your OT environment exposed to preventable cyber risk.
From modern data centers and smart hospitals to commercial real estate and universities, the line between the digital and the physical has blurred. IT security teams are increasingly inheriting responsibility for securing cyber-physical systems (CPS) — the HVAC controllers keeping servers cool, the badge readers securing facility entrances, and the power distribution units keeping the lights on.
Yet, for many organizations, these OT assets are a massive blind spot.
The “black box” problem
While vulnerability management programs have matured rapidly for IT assets, covering everything from cloud workloads to laptops, operational environments are often a “black box.”
This visibility gap usually stems from two distinct barriers:
- There is a pervasive (and historically valid) fear that scanning OT/IoT assets with traditional IT security tools could knock fragile devices offline, disrupting critical business operations.
- Traditional OT security tools often require a massive undertaking. The complexity and cost of deploying expensive specialized hardware, managing long-term evaluations, architecting complex mirror ports, and navigating the political minefield of installing new appliances in sensitive production environments make these projects difficult to justify.
The result is a dangerous paradox. Security teams are responsible for the risk of interconnected systems, but don’t have the tools to see or secure them. Attackers, however, face no such barriers, frequently pivoting from compromised IT networks to poorly defended OT assets to maximize impact.
Rethinking converged OT/IT security
To secure the modern attack surface, organizations must stop managing IT and OT risk in silos. Security leaders need a unified view that treats a vulnerability on a programmable logic controller (PLC) with the same rigor and context as a vulnerability on a Windows server.
Achieving this requires a fundamental shift in how we approach asset discovery. Security teams need streamlined methods that provide the necessary depth of OT visibility for compliance and risk reduction, without the friction of deploying hardware across physical sites. They need a way to safely seeshadow OT assets using the infrastructure already in place.
Image: A segment of Tenable’s research and testing lab for operational technology (OT).
Introducing VM-Native OT Discovery
Our latest release fundamentally changes the economics and accessibility of OT security tools. We are excited to announce OT Discovery, a new
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