Taking back control of your OT: The barriers

There are undeniably hurdles when it comes to controlling OT, rather than letting OT control you. People may see legacy equipment as a barrier to making progress of any kind. Barker says: “I often get involved with organisations who say, ‘our environment is too legacy’, or ‘we do not have enough connectivity’, or ‘we haven’t fully segregated and segmented our industrial network’.”

ServiceNow works in many different types of environments globally, he adds. “We’ve seen a lot of complexity. However difficult a customer’s challenge might be, the good news is there are approaches to address every challenge. And problems are often simpler to overcome than people realise.”

Barker acknowledges that companies may be wary of IT solutions supporting OT use cases, too.

“ServiceNow began as an IT solution. Fast-forward to 2023, and we have capability for HR, legal, finance, field service management, and from a platform point of view we have a common approach where we bring everything together – definitely not just an IT tool.

“To support industrial environments we have to have controlled segregation between the IT and OT parts of the business. IT by default can’t see any OT; OT by default can’t see any IT. You have to have a business need and the right permissions to do so.

“If I’m an industrial control technician and I work at one centre, one area, one bay, that’s all I can see. If I’m head of a water pump station, I can’t see my neighbours. We lock things down by business need.

“It’s important that whoever is digitalising your OT takes security measures like these incredibly seriously; it’s built into all aspects of what we do, whether that’s from a product point of view, or development, engineering and testing of code.

“We also have unique third parties who regularly attempt to penetrate our network to ensure our security is as good as it can possibly be.”