IT vs. OT Security: What's the Difference?

United they stand, divided they fall

Securing IT and OT environments is essential as organizations strive to protect their digital and physical assets. While both domains aim to prevent unauthorized access and ensure integrity, confidentiality, and availability, they take different approaches and face distinct challenges.

As organizations pursue digital transformation, a unified approach to IT and OT security consolidates and elevates protection for both environments.

What Is IT Security?

Information technology (IT) security protects IT systems, data, and networks from unauthorized access, attacks, and damage.

Goals: Detect and prevent data breaches to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IT resources.

What Is OT Security?

Operational technology (OT) security protects industrial and critical infrastructure systems from cyberthreats and unauthorized access.

Goals: Monitor and control systems to prevent disruptions that could impact physical safety or operational uptime.

IT vs. OT Security: Shared Threats and Challenges

Both IT and OT environments are susceptible to many types of cyberthreats, including:

• Malware and ransomware designed to damage, steal, or manipulate systems and data
• Vulnerability exploits, including zero-day attacks, targeting hardware or software
• Advanced persistent threats (APTs) that give attackers long-term access
• Supply chain attacks that compromise third-party software or hardware

Major challenges in common across environments include:

• Regulatory compliance mandates around data privacy and governance
• IT/OT convergence complexity due to incompatibility between OT systems and IT security

IT/OT Convergence: Why It Matters

Integrating IT and OT is a major step in digital transformation, creating a more unified infrastructure that helps organizations share and manage the data and processes of both ecosystems.

By combining the strengths of IT and OT, convergence helps organizations optimize operational efficiency, reduce downtime and costs, improve issue response times, and strengthen security and resilience.

Combining real-time OT sensor data and IT analytics can enable use cases like:

• Predictive maintenance
• Remote monitoring and control
• Supply chain and logistics optimization
• Improved quality control
• Industry 4.0 innovations

Read more: Extend Zero Trust to Your OT and IoT Security

The Role of Zero Trust in IT and OT Security

A zero trust architecture applies continuous verification and strict access controls at every level—never conferring any user, device, or application implicit trust.

Zero trust access controls ensure all entities are authenticated and authorized before they are granted access to IT and OT systems, devices, and data. This enhances the organization’s security posture, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access, lateral movement, vulnerability exploits, insider threats, and service disruption.

Ultimately, zero trust enables organizations to maintain more robust, resilient security frameworks to protect their IT and OT environments from evolving threats.

Secure your OT with zero trust

Best Practices for Managing IT and OT Security Together

• Develop a unified security strategy that aligns security policies, procedures, and governance across IT and OT systems.
• Implement effective segmentation to isolate IT and OT systems, minimizing the risk of lateral threat movement by attackers.
• Deploy a cloud native zero trust architecture to enforce least-privileged access controls and ensure no entity is trusted by default.
• Centralize security monitoring, management, and visibility with tools like security information and event management (SIEM) to detect and respond to threats in real time.
• Conduct regular risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities and potential threats in IT and OT systems. Prioritize and address identified risks through appropriate mitigation measures.
• Establish a robust patch management process for both IT and OT systems to quickly address vulnerabilities.
• Implement strong access controls (e.g., multifactor authentication [MFA], single sign-on [SSO]) aligned with the principle of least privilege.
• Ensure governance controls for third-party access into IT/OT systems (e.g. session recording, supervised access, credential vaults).
• Create and maintain an IT/OT incident response plan. Conduct drills and simulations to ensure preparedness for potential security incidents.