Securing OT environments a growth area for 2025

There is a clear opportunity for channel businesses with security expertise to support the operational technology (OT) market.

Some of those that have identified and backed the OT trend have already seen acceleration in the market and are expecting that momentum to continue into 2025. One example is Distology.

Lance Williams, chief technology officer at Distology, said the distributor was always looking to identify growth areas and had made moves a year ago to bolster its position around OT, expanding its vendor portfolio to cover that market’s needs.

“We’re always looking for things that are causing our customers problems. Over the last several years, more and more operational technology has been network connected for obvious reasons that you’ve got the manufacturing space, you’re trying to pull telemetry data and production data from the machines so that you can make better business decisions. The best way to do that is by putting a cable in there, pulling the data off into a database and then analysing it with your business intelligence tools,” he said.

“You’ve also got connectivity, so trying to get the machines to feed that data over different types of network connection and so on so forth. The OT world is not used to having cables and Wi-Fi plugged into the back of it,” he added.

Along with the security risks multiplying as unsecured OT systems are connected to the network, customers are also facing regulatory pressures.

Williams said the OT world spoke a different language to the traditional IT channel, so those looking to sell into that space had to appreciate the differences and pitch a message that recognised they were speaking to systems operators that concentrate on health and safety and uptime.

“It’s completely different priorities, but because you’ve got this convergence, [with] IT things being plugged into OT things to try to get business data so you can make better decisions and create efficiencies, you’re now linking up machines that weren’t designed to be exposed to the digital world, and by and large, they are therefore unprotected,” said Williams.

“There is a growing interest in the IT channel because it’s a huge area of revenue and GP growth. And you can’t just throw our traditional IT cyber security systems at the IT environments, either. It’s a whole tranche of new technology providers,” he added. These include the likes of Opswat, Cyolo and Dragos.

Williams said it was supporting an ecosystem of partners to connect IT specialists with their OT counterparts, and more of those vendors were becoming familiar to the channel and recruiting executives with a classic IT partner background.

One year on from Distology sounding the call to focus on OT, the channel player has seen growth and plenty of activity. Williams expects that to continue into 2025.

“The pace is building. I’m going to use Opswat, because they’re one of our key growth vendors in the space, because they specialise in critical national infrastructure security, they saw a huge quarter,” he said. “They’re a really good example, and that’s because they’re addressing critical national infrastructure, which is a combination of IT and OT.”

Others in the security industry have also identified OT as an area that needs protection and one ripe for those with the IT networking skills to solve those challenges.

Speaking to MicroScope last month, Axel Conrad, senior director and head of EMEA channel at BlackBerry, discussed the vendor’s focus on the OT opportunity. “We see a huge growth and interest from partners focusing on OT,” he said. “It’s a different ecosystem.”