Building Actionable Continuous Exposure Management

Figure 1. Business Continuity and the Industrial Process. Risks and Impact

Figure 2. Contextual risks: Obsolescence Management. SecureOT

Consider obsolescence management and the relationship between the life cycle of operational technology assets, such as PLCs, gateways, relays, network equipment, and their respective levels of criticality. The obsolescence status of a critical asset, whether Active, Active Mature, Limited, End-of-life, or Discontinued, is a key indicator of its associated risk regarding availability. Factors such as discontinued manufacturer support, challenges with replacement, and lack of updates can significantly affect these risks, thereby influencing the continuity of production processes and overall business operations.

In a similar manner, monitoring fundamental health parameters of critical assets is instrumental in anticipating or identifying potential secondary threats. A significant rise in CPU usage, the presence of new processes, or alterations in process privilege levels may signal malicious activity. Proactively tracking the health of essential assets and correlating these metrics with other contextual data is crucial for effective risk mitigation and early detection of emerging issues.

While information regarding asset obsolescence and health parameters is valuable individually, their integration is a cornerstone of continuous threat exposure management. For example, the need to expand system capacity, such as upgrading CPU or memory, may be hindered if the asset has been discontinued. Replacing the system with an alternative from the same or another manufacturer can be time-consuming, and the technical implications—such as differences in firmware versions or new interfaces with disparate functionalities—may be difficult to anticipate. These considerations become especially significant during crises that impact critical assets, particularly within regulated industries such as chemicals or pharmaceuticals. In these sectors, any changes or updates to the infrastructure supporting production processes must be validated through established procedures.

Achieving comprehensive 360° visibility is essential for effective process continuity management. This approach enables organizations to anticipate underlying issues that extend beyond cybersecurity and proactively prevent unplanned operational shutdowns.

Building on this proactive approach, the capability to monitor changes in the configuration of OT assets serves as valuable contextual information for identifying operational risks and predicting potential unscheduled shutdowns. Alterations to variables within critical assets at unexpected times can provide early indications of underlying issues. These changes often remain undetected by network monitoring tools, as they occur internally within the asset and are executed by authenticated users via authorized systems. While it may be possible to verify that modifications were performed by authorized personnel using designated platforms on relevant assets, evaluating whether the nature and extent of such changes are safe for ongoing operations remains challenging.

Passive network monitoring tools are insufficient for generating a comprehensive inventory of plant software, leaving blindspots in a continuous threat exposure management program. Consequently, it is often necessary to utilize supplementary tools that fulfill this requirement effectively; however, these solutions require the operation, maintenance, and supervision through separate consoles. This results in increased operational workload and necessitates additional training for operators across multiple platforms.

Bridging the Regulatory and Compliance Divide

Alongside the requirement to monitor the exposure of OT assets and ensure their availability from a comprehensive risk perspective, there is also a need to assess compliance with corporate policies, such as system hardening, backups, antivirus protection, for those OT assets. It is essential to regularly and systematically evaluate policy compliance, continuously identifying assets that are either compliant or non-compliant, as well as determining the underlying causes (for example: open ports, SSH access, syslog status, IP source routing, password protection, USB storage management, backup status, antivirus version, etc.).

Regulatory compliance is an essential aspect of business operations, as failure to comply can result in significant financial penalties, legal consequences, criminal liability at the management level, or even the revocation of licenses required to operate in specific sectors. For instance, the implementation of the European NIS2 directive has prompted organizations to enhance internal reporting from mid-level to senior management, thereby improving corporate governance bodies' visibility into regulatory compliance status and associated risks.

Meeting the Demands of NIS2 and Corporate Governance

Business management teams are responsible for establishing dashboards that reflect compliance with regulatory requirements; however, often they do not possess the necessary tools to efficiently generate and automate these reports. Additionally, it is essential to identify the Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) within each requirement or use case, determine the appropriate metrics for measurement, and establish the thresholds that the organization considers normal or acceptable. It is also necessary to integrate the compliance measurement tool with existing IT and OT systems and to automate report generation to ensure efficiency. This represents a significant corporate challenge, as integration and automation skills are typically found within IT teams, whereas the identification of use cases and associated metrics resides with production teams. Therefore, cross-functional understanding and collaboration are crucial, even though these interactions do not always occur naturally.

Figure 8. Building Continuous Exposure Management. Why do organizations fail?

We can continue to identify sources of contextual information pertinent to business continuity in order to achieve comprehensive visibility as advocated by CEM. These sources include maintaining backup copies in accordance with continuity policies, ensuring antivirus databases are up to date, monitoring critical process variables, gathering intelligence data for NIDS networks and netflow NVE, managing logs effectively, parsing equipment configurations, among others. Such practices are essential for advancing our CEM maturity.

Many organizations must utilize multiple tools to address essential sources and context assessments beyond traditional vulnerability-based methods, such as CVEs, CVSS, cybersecurity risks, and the detection of anomalous behavior through passive network monitoring. As a result, security and risk management departments are often compelled to manage a collection of single-purpose platforms, each optimized for its specific function but operating independently. This fragmentation requires teams to develop expertise in numerous systems at both the user and administrative levels, replicate similar use cases across different platforms with unique characteristics, and continuously switch between various consoles.

In this scenario, the approach to CEM is proposed as an aggregation of sources, data and different reports, usually manually or, in the best of cases, through some type of automation and analytics supported by external tools.

The problem with this model is low efficiency and operational complexity.

One operational challenge with this approach is coordinating activities across multiple consoles. To automate dashboard production and generate targeted dashboards for monitoring critical process assets, it is often necessary to develop a custom integration leveraging an advanced analytics layer (such as PowerBI, Cloudera, or Q-Lik) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies.

From a financial standpoint, the implementation of a centralized reporting tool necessitates an upfront investment in its development and integration with context data platforms. Additionally, there are potential substantial ongoing costs associated with platform licensing, maintaining platform data feeds, and continuous troubleshooting efforts.

Figure 9. What is Continuous Exposure Management (CEM) for OT. The Integration and Automation challenge

While the concept has been explored extensively within the IT sector over the years, operational complexity continues to present significant challenges to achieving high maturity in CEM, particularly when considering the unique requirements of OT environments. Recent research and surveys indicate that insufficiently mature CEM practices hinder proactive identification of various causes of availability loss, such as hardware failures, software problems, human error, and cybersecurity incidents, and contribute to nearly 50% of unplanned shutdowns in production settings.

Figure 10. Immature CEM is behind half of unplanned downtime events

This complexity impedes organizational progress to achieve CEM maturity. According to Rockwell Automation's "State of Smart Manufacturing 2025" report, 38% of organizations are already working in this direction on advanced analytics projects, but yet, according to a survey "2023's Challenges and Tomorrow's Defenses", by SANS ICS/OT, only 15% of organizations have the internal capacity to develop these advanced operational analytics models that enable CEM capability.

Furthermore, it is important to note that these solutions are seldom designed to be directly actionable. This means they do not typically enable remediation mechanisms to be activated from within the CEM platform itself, requiring users instead to access individual consoles of various specialized platforms (such as updates, patch deployment, user and account management, or adjustment of bastion parameters). Each action, whether it involves patching, OS configurations, account administration, or port closure, generally necessitates a separate tool.

To understand the reason behind this lack of corporate capabilities, you need to understand what goes into developing an automated EMF platform for exposure management and prevention of unscheduled shutdowns due to issues arising from technology assets.

As illustrated in Figure 8, "Building Continuous Exposure Management—Why Organizations Fail?", the responsibility for automating and integrating CEM functionalities typically rests with IT departments. Tasks such as script development, API integration, dashboards, and automation playbooks usually fall within their remit. However, IT teams often lack sufficient knowledge of production parameters to determine which use cases to develop, identify Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), and define metrics for calculating these KRIs. Additionally, they may not be equipped to establish acceptable thresholds or continuity parameters, which are essential for measuring current risk levels, monitoring risk trends, generating significant alerts, and analyzing SLT vs. SLA performance in critical areas.

The Path to Actionable Remediation

SecureOT Platform provides an integrated technology that manages the entire process from data capture, normalization, and enrichment with contextual information, through advanced correlation and machine learning, to response and remediation. This approach addresses and eliminates previously identified operational and financial inefficiencies.

Figure 11. Secure OT Integrated Approach. Exposure Management and Remediation using ML and advanced correlation

Integration complexity is streamlined by consolidating functions into a single tool equipped with a reporting layer. SecureOT Platform offers native capabilities that replace numerous single-purpose platforms, and it seamlessly integrates with external platforms to captures and centralized logs for analytics and reporting. Use cases and dashboards are developed within this integrated environment, while the platform also enables operational actions such as parameter changes, updates, patch management, software removal, and account deletion—through role-based access, which can be integrated with local or corporate directories if available, and adheres to a least-privilege policy. As a result, SecureOT Platform serves as a comprehensive and actionable technology for not only monitoring and assessing risks and exposure, but also executing risk mitigation activities. This makes SecureOT Platform an Actionable Contending Exposure Management (CEM) platform.

Automated Compliance and Regulatory Alignment

With regard to compliance, SecureOT Platform provides continuous monitoring of operational technology parameters related to regulatory compliance frameworks, such as NIS2, NERC-CIP, and CSC, and internal policies, including hardening, device usage, software management, backup procedures, and basic log retention capabilities.

Context-Aware Cybersecurity and Risk Assessment

From a cybersecurity perspective, this approach encompasses conventional methods such as asset inventory, vulnerability assessment, risk evaluation, and detection through both rule-based and anomaly-based techniques. It also involves the development of criticality assessments determined by user-defined asset importance. In addition to the traditional approach, all relevant contextual information, such as life cycle status, accounts and users, compliance status, backup status is incorporated. This comprehensive perspective provides a more accurate assessment of risk and allows for a stronger focus on ensuring the continuity of the OT process.

Centralized Oversight and Multi-Vendor Integration

OT asset management represents a key capability, with SecureOT Platform enabling centralized oversight of all devices. This consolidation streamlines processes such as updates, maintenance, and change detection, thereby reducing operational workload and enhancing overall efficiency. SecureOT is designed as a multi-vendor and multi-industry solution, enabling adoption across various manufacturers and sectors. It integrates efficiently into complex infrastructures, delivering comprehensive protection regardless of the technological diversity present within the environment.

Figure 12. SecureOT Platform: Actionable Continuous Exposure Management

SecureOT Platform leverages over 30 years of expertise in managing risk within operational technology (OT) environments. The platform distinguishes itself by delivering enhanced visibility into both software and hardware OT assets,including those that do not actively generate network traffic, such as dormant systems and applications. This capability provides comprehensive and granular asset information, regardless of network activity, thereby enabling effective management and oversight in complex industrial settings through the integration of operational variables with pertinent contextual data.