Why Operational Technology (OT) Should Be Treated as a Business Domain

Digital Transformation has redefined the way modern enterprises operate. By interconnecting systems and processes across traditional silos, from the supply chain to the customer experience, organizations are better equipped to achieve business outcomes with speed and agility. Yet, despite these technological integrations, many enterprises continue to treat their core domains, especially Operational Technology (OT), as isolated verticals. This fragmented approach is increasingly misaligned with the realities of today’s interconnected, data-driven businesses.

It’s time to recognize OT not merely as a set of industrial control systems, but as a full-fledged business domain, equal in strategic importance to Finance, Sales, HR, IT, and others. Doing so will allow organizations to improve risk posture, accelerate cross-functional collaboration, and enhance resilience across the entire enterprise.

The Siloed Reality of Security in a Connected Business

Security has traditionally been applied unevenly across different business units. IT departments often have mature controls, detailed risk registers, and formal governance models, while OT environments, built for uptime and physical reliability, frequently operate with outdated protocols and minimal visibility.

This divide becomes dangerous when business interconnections are ignored. In many recent cyberattacks, the initial compromise occurs in IT systems, but operational disruptions and safety risks are felt most acutely in OT environments.

Executives are then faced with two critical questions:

• Are we able to continue to operate?
• Are we safe to operate?

If OT security is narrowly focused only on industrial assets (PLCs, HMIs, SCADA systems), without considering business-wide interdependencies such as ordering systems, inventory, billing, or ERP, the answer to both questions becomes unclear and potentially devastating.

 The Role of Data in Contextualizing Risk

In a previous article, I discussed how collecting and analyzing data within business context enables a deeper understanding of operational risk. This includes identifying:

• Business-critical systems and applications
• Cross-domain processes
• Safety and security requirements
• Dependencies between domains

For instance, a factory may halt production not because a machine fails, but because the ordering or billing system (usually owned by IT or business operations) is compromised. OT cannot manage that risk in isolation.

Enabling Business Context Through Cross-Functional Data Collection

One of the most underleveraged capabilities in many organizations is the ability to collect and correlate data across disparate systems and processes, spanning IT, OT, Safety, Finance, HR, and Supply Chain. While data exists in abundance, it is often confined within silos, making it difficult to interpret operational events in the context of business outcomes.

By enabling cross-functional data collection, organizations can generate analytics that reflect the true context of operations.

This approach provides multiple advantages:

• Operational risk is no longer viewed in isolation (e.g., just a failed PLC or a security alert), but as part of a broader narrative that includes dependencies, impact to upstream/downstream systems, and business service continuity.
• This contextualization of data allows cybersecurity teams and OT leaders to produce risk reports that are meaningful to executive leadership, not in technical terms, but in terms of business risk, continuity impact, and tolerances.
• For example, if a billing system is compromised but properly segmented, the business can assess financial impacts without assuming full operational shutdown. Similarly, an isolated OT incident can be evaluated for its actual effect on production, rather than triggering enterprise-wide panic.
• Ultimately, this data-centric, cross-domain visibility creates a feedback loop:
• Disparate systems feed centralized analytics
• Analytics provide contextual insights
• Insights inform executive-level decisions on “Are we safe to operate?”

With this model in place, organizations transform raw telemetry into actionable business intelligence, enabling leaders to make informed, timely decisions during both steady-state operations and crisis scenarios.

 Why OT Must Be a Full Business Domain

Treating OT as a standalone technical engineering environment undermines its value and risk profile. Instead, OT must be integrated as a core business domain, with its own:

• Risk management strategy
• Business continuity responsibilities
• Executive reporting structure
• Cross-domain collaboration mechanisms

OT should participate in enterprise architecture planning, incident response tabletop exercises, and digital transformation roadmaps just like any other domain.

 Modernizing OT Infrastructure Within the Purdue Model

Traditionally, OT systems have adopted a legacy approach to IT infrastructure, especially at Level 3 and Level 3.5 of the Purdue Model. These layers are critical for business integration and supervisory control, housing core systems such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), SCADA master servers, data historians, MEP and HVAC systems, IAM platforms, and domain controllers.

To maintain system availability and process continuity, these components have historically been deployed on isolated, purpose-built hardware. However, a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) model offers a compelling alternative, one that aligns with modern business needs while remaining true to IEC-62443’s zones and conduits framework for secure communication and segmentation.

By virtualizing Level 3/3.5 components on a unified HCI platform, organizations gain:

• Enhanced system availability and uptime through resource pooling and failover
• Improved segmentation for enforcing security boundaries across critical assets
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) by consolidating hardware and licensing
• Lower operational overhead through centralized management of compute, storage, and networking
• Simplified compliance with industry standards, thanks to infrastructure-aligned security zoning

This approach not only modernizes OT architecture but also lays the groundwork for consistent security and governance across IT and OT domains, critical for holistic enterprise risk management.

Major Domains of a Typical Large Enterprise and Their Interdependencies

Building Resilience Through Unified Platforms and Contextual Security

To protect business outcomes in a world of interconnected systems, organizations must move beyond siloed architectures and adopt a platform-based approach that unifies compute, storage, and networking into a single, software-defined structure. This foundational shift enables scalable domain segmentation, ensuring that each area of the business, whether OT, IT, Finance, or Supply Chain, can be isolated, governed, and protected independently.

When combined with Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), enterprises gain fine-grained control over who can access what, when, and under what conditions, across all domains. Complementing this with centralized platforms for managing network, security, and compute resources delivers the visibility and control needed to enforce policy, detect anomalies, and act quickly when threats emerge.

This architecture enables:

• Macro-segmentation of business domains to contain breaches
• Domain-specific security controls tailored to operational needs (Critically important)
• Unified governance across OT, IT, Safety, and business systems
• Context-aware risk reporting for executive decision-makers (Business Language Reporting)
• Rapid isolation and recovery to ensure business continuity

In the face of an attack, this approach allows an organization to sever (Drawbridge Down) a compromised domain from the broader enterprise without bringing down the entire operation. Executives can confidently answer the critical question:

"Are we safe to operate?"

With the right segmentation, governance, and context-driven controls, the answer can be a confident “Yes”, even in the face of adversity. That’s the promise of treating OT as a business domain and securing it within a unified, resilient enterprise architecture.