The Crisis Response That Backfired
A utility organisation faced mounting pressure to demonstrate progress on OT security. Internal agendas collided with executive impatience. The solution? Deploy an OT Security Operations Centre. Fast.
No readiness assessment. No operational alignment. Just procurement, installation, and a dashboard to show the board.
Within months, the cracks appeared. The SOC generated relentless false positives. Alerts flooded in faster than anyone could validate them. Operations teams, already stretched, began ignoring notifications entirely. Alert fatigue set in. Trust eroded.
Rather than pause and recalibrate, the organisation doubled down. They expanded coverage to more sites, convinced that scale would somehow solve the underlying problem. It didn’t. The noise became chaos. Eighteen months later, they pulled the entire system out and started again from scratch.
The failure wasn’t technical. It was strategic. Speed had been mistaken for competence. Activity had been mistaken for progress. And the cost wasn’t just financial. It was credibility, momentum, and organisational trust in security itself.
The Problem: Speed as a Liability in OT
In OT environments, haste doesn’t just create inefficiency. It creates fragility.
The pressure to act fast is real. Boards want visible progress. Compliance deadlines loom. Competitors appear to be moving faster. The temptation is to deploy controls now and refine them later.
But OT doesn’t forgive improvisation the way IT sometimes does. A misconfigured firewall rule can halt production. An untested monitoring tool can flood operators with noise during a critical incident. A security control imposed without operational buy-in becomes a point of friction, not protection.
When organisations skip the groundwork and rush straight to deployment, they make a predictable set of mistakes:
They skip the readiness assessment. They deploy before they understand the environment. Asset inventories are incomplete. Network topologies are assumed, not validated. Operational workflows are guessed at, not documented.
They prioritise coverage over capability. More sensors. More dashboards. More data. But no clarity on what to do with any of it. Coverage becomes a vanity metric. Capability remains absent.
They confuse activity with progress. Tools get installed. Reports get generated. Meetings get held. But risk doesn’t reduce. Incidents don’t get prevented. The organisation is busy, but not safer.
They ignore operational alignment. Security gets imposed, not embedded. Operations teams are told what’s happening, not consulted on how it should happen. The result is resentment, workarounds, and controls that get bypassed the moment they create friction.
This isn’t a failure of intent. It’s a failure of process. And it stems from a false trade-off: the belief that you must choose between doing something now and doing it right.
You don’t.
The Shift: Methodical Maturity, Not Rushed Coverage
Methodical doesn’t mean slow. It means sustainable.
It means thinking before acting. It means cohesive decision-making that aligns security, operations, and executive priorities before anyone touches a configuration file.
Methodical maturity is visible in the questions an organisation asks before deployment:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Why does it matter to the business, to operations, to safety?
- Who needs to be involved, and who owns the outcome?
- How will we deploy this without creating new risks?
- When is the right time, not just the urgent time?
- Where do we start — which zone, which asset, which priority?
These questions aren’t new. They echo the foundational interrogatives of enterprise architecture frameworks like SABSA and Zachman. But in OT security, they’re rarely applied with discipline. Organisations skip straight to “how” or “when” without anchoring in “what” and “why.” The frameworks exist. The problem is that no one uses them when it matters most.
Methodical maturity builds confidence. It earns trust. It creates controls that last, not controls that crumble under operational pressure.
And it gives security leaders the strategic credibility to push back when boards demand instant results.
The Framework: Four Stages of a Methodical OT Uplift
Building OT security capability isn’t a single deployment. It’s a sequence. Each stage builds on the last. Skip a stage, and the foundation weakens.
Stage 1: Readiness Assessment
Understand before you act.
A readiness assessment maps the current state: what assets exist, how they’re configured, where the gaps are, and what operational constraints matter. It identifies dependencies, bottlenecks, and assumptions that haven’t been tested.
This isn’t a compliance checklist. It’s a grounded view of reality. It reveals what’s actually ready for security controls and what isn’t.
Without this foundation, everything that follows is guesswork.
Stage 2: Zone Prioritisation
Start where it matters most.
Not all OT zones carry equal risk. Not all require the same level of security maturity at the same time. Prioritisation is about focus, not coverage.
Identify the zones where an incident would cause the most operational, safety, or reputational harm. Start there. Build capability in a high-priority zone first. Prove the approach works. Then replicate.
This is how you demonstrate progress to a board without creating chaos across the entire estate.
Stage 3: Alignment with Operations
Embed, don’t impose.
Security controls that disrupt operations get bypassed, resented, or blamed when things go wrong. Controls that are designed with operational input get adopted, defended, and improved over time.
Alignment means involving operations early. It means understanding their workflows, constraints, and tolerances. It means testing controls in context before rolling them out at scale.
This stage is where trust is either built or broken. Get it right, and operations become advocates. Get it wrong, and security becomes the obstacle everyone routes around.
Stage 4: Measured Rollout
Build confidence through iteration.
A pilot zone is proof of concept. It shows that the approach works in the real environment, with real operational buy-in. It provides evidence-based confidence to scale.
Measured rollout means moving deliberately from pilot to broader deployment. It means validating at each step. It means adjusting based on what’s learned, not stubbornly sticking to a plan that reality has already contradicted.
This is how sustainable capability is built. Not through a single big-bang deployment, but through disciplined iteration.
Why This Works: Confidence, Control, and Credibility
Methodical maturity delivers three things that rushed deployments cannot:
Confidence. Security leaders know their controls work because they’ve been tested in context. Operations teams trust the controls because they were involved in designing them. Executives trust the program because it’s delivered measurable progress without operational disruption.
Control. The organisation understands what it has deployed, why it’s there, and what to do when something changes. There’s no mystery. No black boxes. No reliance on vendor promises that don’t survive contact with reality.
Credibility. When security speaks, people listen. Not because security shouted louder, but because they demonstrated competence. They showed up with a plan that worked. They respected operational constraints. They delivered.
This is what maturity looks like. And it’s a strategic advantage, not a delay tactic.
What to Ask Internally
If your organisation is under pressure to accelerate OT security, ask these questions before committing to a timeline:
Are we building capability, or just adding controls? Coverage is easy to measure. Capability is harder. But only capability reduces risk.
What are we assuming is ready and have we tested that assumption? Assumptions are where deployments fail. Test them before they become problems.
What happens if this goes wrong on day one? If the answer is “we’ll figure it out,” you’re not ready.
Who from operations has been involved in this decision? If the answer is “no one yet,” stop. Align first. Deploy second.
What does success look like in six months? If the answer is “full coverage,” reframe. Success is operational buy-in, proven capability, and sustainable progress.
Speed vs. Sustainability
Speed feels like progress. But in OT, speed without strategy is just a faster route to failure.
Methodical maturity isn’t about moving slowly. It’s about moving sustainably. It’s about building security that earns trust, withstands operational pressure, and scales without breaking.
The organisations that succeed in OT security aren’t the ones that act fastest. They’re the ones that think first, align early, and build deliberately.
That’s not a delay tactic. That’s a strategic advantage.