Over 85 percent of surveyed companies report having no  centralized monitoring of networked industrial devices…

An article review.

If you are involved in IT within your organization, you’re probably aware of the importance of being able to monitor relevant activity from your networked devices, especially if your organization is involved in healthcare, finance, or government.  Outside of regulated industries however, it appears that awareness is still lacking.

That’s the takeaway from a new survey from security firm Fortinet, which polled over 500 professionals in the field of OT, or operational technology.  Compared to information technology, operational technology involves devices that directly monitor or control industrial equipment.  While these devices were often not connected to the internet in the past, that has changed dramatically in recent years, and unfortunately security practices appear to have not yet caught up.

The survey revealed that over 85 percent of respondents could not easily monitor network activity from their industrial devices, and only 52 percent said industrial device activity was tracked by a security operations center, or SOC.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same survey showed that over 90 percent of respondents said their organization had a breach within the last year involving their industrial devices, with nearly 80 percent stating they had more than three such incidents.

One promising sign that organizations appear to be coming around on the issue is that spending on cybersecurity at the polled organizations has been increasing, however there is still a long way–and probably many more cybersecurity incidents–to go.

Original article by Dennis Scimeca writing for IndustryWeek.

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