Your OT safety proof-of-concept carried out flawlessly. Six months later, the enterprise-wide rollout has stalled. Budgets are exhausted, and important visibility gaps stay. If this sounds acquainted, you’re not alone.
Most industrial organizations uncover that OT safety options that work effectively in managed pilots develop into unmanageable when deployed throughout a whole lot of switches, 1000’s of belongings, and a number of websites.
The stakes couldn’t be greater—with out complete visibility you can’t successfully scale back the assault floor or implement community segmentation, and all it takes is a single compromised system that may shut down whole manufacturing strains, costing tens of millions per hour.
The Hidden Price of Bolted-On Safety
Conventional OT visibility options depend on SPAN expertise to reflect community visitors to devoted sensor home equipment. Whereas this method appears easy in a lab, it rapidly turns into problematic at scale.
Contemplate a typical manufacturing plant with 100 or extra switches. Every swap wants a sensor equipment to seize native visitors, since most industrial communications occur on the cell layer between controllers. This east-west visitors happens on the lowest ranges of the Purdue mannequin (Ranges 0-2) and doesn’t cross via the normal north-south aggregation factors that join totally different zones to the commercial information middle. That’s 100+ home equipment to buy, deploy, energy, cool, and keep. The capital and operational prices spiral uncontrolled.
Some distributors counsel utilizing Distant SPAN (RSPAN) to scale back equipment depend by forwarding visitors from a number of switches to centralized sensors. This method backfires in manufacturing environments. RSPAN can double community visitors, introducing jitter that disrupts time-sensitive industrial processes. In extremely automated services, this latency can sluggish manufacturing charges and break time synchronization between machines.
The choice—constructing an out-of-band SPAN assortment community—requires duplicating your whole community infrastructure. You want parallel switches, cabling, and upkeep assets. As your manufacturing community grows, so should this duplicated community. Many organizations abandon their deployments once they understand the true value.
Why Partial Visibility Equals No Safety
Even in the event you can’t spend money on a visibility answer, you may suppose that energetic discovery mechanisms will probably be enough for figuring out belongings. However Community Tackle Translation (NAT) will block these discovery requests.
Industrial gear producers standardize their machine configurations, reusing IP addresses throughout manufacturing cells. Whereas PLCs and HMIs may need translated addresses seen at Degree 3, the drives, security controllers, and I/O modules under stay hidden. In automotive manufacturing, for instance, 80% of Degree 0-2 units sit behind NAT boundaries, invisible to centralized discovery instruments.
This visibility hole has severe penalties. You can not safe what you can’t see. You can not phase networks with out understanding communication patterns. And you can’t adjust to laws like NERC CIP-15 or NIS2 and not using a full and updated asset stock.
Most critically, attackers exploit these blind spots. They transfer laterally via the invisible east-west visitors between controllers, spreading ransomware or manipulating processes whereas defenders monitor the flawed locations.
The Community-as-Sensor Revelation
Cisco takes a basically totally different method: as a substitute of bolting on safety home equipment, we embed visibility and safety capabilities straight into community infrastructure. Cisco Cyber Imaginative and prescient runs as software program inside industrial switches and routers, utilizing devoted CPU cores to carry out Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) with out impacting community efficiency. As a result of it operates on the edge the place units join, it sees all visitors and may actively question units behind NAT boundaries.
Relatively than duplicating whole visitors flows, Cyber Imaginative and prescient decodes IP and ICS protocols throughout the swap or router to extract solely the metadata it wants, including solely 2-5% visitors to the community as a substitute of the 50-80% burden of conventional approaches. No further home equipment. No SPAN assortment networks. No efficiency degradation.
For brownfield environments with non-Cisco gear, Cyber Imaginative and prescient deploys flexibly through Docker containers or digital machines. These sensors course of information regionally and don’t ahead packets. Provided that pricing is predicated on found endpoints and never variety of sensors deployed ends in seamless sensor deployment and scalability throughout brownfield environments.
Actual-World Community-Native Success
Complete visibility allows Zero Belief segmentation, important for holding breaches and sustaining operations throughout incidents. However segmentation with out full visibility is harmful—blocking official visitors can shut down manufacturing.
Organizations deploying Cisco’s network-native method report instant advantages past safety. Full visibility accelerates troubleshooting, lowering imply time to restore. Automated asset stock simplifies regulatory audits. Having factual details about your OT safety posture additionally helps IT and OT groups collaborate to implement finest practices.
Most significantly, this method scales. Whether or not you’re securing a single plant or a whole lot of web sites globally, the mannequin stays constant: now you can obtain complete industrial safety with out operational complexity.
Your Path Ahead
The selection is evident. Bolted-on approaches to industrial safety end in including operational complexity and price that also go away gaps. Merely said, this method just isn’t constructed to scale. Conversely, Cisco’s method turns your community right into a safety sensor and enforcement mechanism, making extremely scalable industrial safety a actuality.
Begin by assessing your present visibility gaps and figuring out crucial belongings. Consider options primarily based on scalability at manufacturing scale, not POC efficiency. Contemplate whole possession prices together with {hardware}, community capability, and operational overhead.
As industrial networks develop extra advanced and threats extra refined, the window for implementing efficient OT safety is narrowing. The query isn’t whether or not to safe your OT atmosphere, however whether or not you’ll select an method that truly scales.
Able to be taught extra? Go to cisco.com/go/cybervision or meet the workforce on the S4x26 convention in Miami Feb 23-26, 2026.
Click on right here for the Resolution Temporary: Gaining Visibility into Industrial Networks at Scale
