Introduction
As security, privacy, and safety concerns remain a key priority for the manufacturing and critical infrastructure sector, which is looking for digital transformation, the role of emerging security technology must continue to evolve.
Product leaders are confronted by the continuous challenges posed by the overall market and must address the following areas in order to be successful:
- Technological advancements;
- Infrastructural transformation;
- Process transformation;
- Application transformation;
- Organizational dynamics;
- Regulatory change; and
- Evolving threat landscape.
As attack surfaces increase, the need to address physical and cyber threats will lead to the need for higher levels of adaptation by emerging technologies to address a multitude of environments across manufacturing. The threat landscape continues to involve. For example, in mid-2020, the American National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert (AA20-205A) recommending immediate action to reduce exposure across Operational Technology (OT) assets and control systems.
Emerging tech security radar
The need for advanced security devices led Gartner to publish “Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Security in Manufacturing” which analyses and illustrates two significant aspects of impact:
- When can we expect it to have a significant impact on the market, specifically range; and
- How much of an impact will it have on relevant markets, namely mass?
This year, seven emerging technologies were highlighted (see the radar below).
The radar above reflects an environment where legacy systems evolve and the need for security posturing meets these challenges.
However, as the OT market moves toward more connected systems and newly designed advanced cyber-physical systems (CPS), traditional OT management, governance, infrastructure and security become influenced by IT. Gartner refers to this as “IT/OT convergence.”
Recommendations
Product leaders looking to capitalize on these emerging trends must start by taking the following steps:
- Develop and demonstrate security features that, while helping mitigate threats, guarantee safety, availability, reliability, resilience and privacy.
- Align product capabilities to demonstrate relevance to specific manufacturing use cases.
- Overcome barriers to manufacturing adoption by surgically targeting solutions for manufacturing organizations that are looking to capitalize on the Internet of Things ( IoT) and digital transformation and to conduct historical data analysis, but are facing the highest levels of regulatory rigour.
- Focus the product positioning strategy by targeting reactive and proactive buyers separately with matching solutions, and by offering targeted capabilities with the aim of expanding into a solution set rather than an all-in-one bundle.
