Managing Identity Risks for Industrial Operational Technology Cybersecurity

Managing identity-based risks for Industrial Operational Technology (OT) cybersecurity requires an electronic connection between physical control systems and traditional IT cybersecurity frameworks. The goal is to adapt proven identity management best practices to the specialized systems that control industrial processes and critical infrastructure.

Today, attack vectors have changed. Threat actors target more than just IT and cloud infrastructure, leaving the identity layer of OT as a critically vulnerable frontier. What were once purely mechanical or electromechanical control systems now carry digital credentials, vendor logins, SSH keys, remote access, and service-account secrets—a risk surface that has remained largely unmanaged. This oversight creates dangerous new pathways for threat actors to compromise operation technology and potentially an entire manufacturing environments with simply login credentials. In this blog, we will provide a high-level roadmap for managing identity risks in industrial OT, informed by foundational principles and modern solutions available in the market today.

Industrial OT environments—such as power plants, water treatment facilities, pipelines, or manufacturing floors—often run on expensive, long-lived hardware with lifecycles exceeding 25 years. These extended lifespans and infrequent refresh cycles create rich opportunities for misconfigurations, credential sprawl, and invisible “privilege paths”. These attack vectors that are typically remediated in IT but frequently ignored in OT due to lapses in change control, IT maturity, and simply the fear of making a simple change without knowing the potential ramifications.

Historically, to mitigate these concerns, many OT administrators relied on air-gapping techniques to isolate networks using architectures like the Purdue Model. This included strict access for any asset to communicate with other resources (lateral movement) and the Internet. However, modern requirements for remote management, vendor access, and IT integrations for DNS and IAM make pure air-gaps increasingly impractical. As OT systems merge into the broader enterprise identity estate, privileged accounts with human, machine, automatic software updates, and AI attributes are proliferating. Without proper identity governance, this becomes an invitation for threat actors to pivot, escalate privileges, and move laterally across environments.

Simply put, the perimeter has dissolved. Identity is the new perimeter, and it is easier for threat actors to “log in” than to “hack in”.

At the heart of defending this expanded risk surface is the discipline of Privileged Access Management (PAM). Privileged Access Management isn’t just about managing administrator or root accounts; it is about controlling, monitoring, auditing, and controlling authentication and access for every identity identity, regardless of its privilege level. For modern OT environments, PAM must be foundational to a secure-by-design strategy rather than an afterthought.

Once your organization begins to treat OT as an extension of the corporate identity estate (instead of a separate siloed network), you can begin to manage identity risk with the same rigor applied to any other sensitive business system.

Key Principles for Operational Identity Security

• Visibility and Auditing for Every Identity: Start by discovering all identities, including human operators, machine accounts, and AI implementations. This should extend beyond employees to cover vendor accounts, service accounts, SSH keys, device credentials, machine-to-machine secrets, etc. Tools that give full visibility across IT and OT are essential because gaps in visibility are the silent enablers of privilege escalation and lateral movement.

• Implement Least Privilege and Just-in-Time (JIT) Access: Grant only the necessary rights needed, when needed, only for the duration and task needed. In OT, this applies to user logons, vendor access, maintenance sessions, and machine-to-machine communications. A just-in-time access model dramatically reduces the window of exposure for critical assets to become a liability.

• Enforce Identity-Secure Remote Access: Legacy VPNs, remote desktop tools, or static vendor access create persistent attack surfaces. Instead, treat every remote or vendor session as privileged access, subject to control, monitoring, and per-session authentication (e.g., 2FA/MFA). All sensitive activity should be monitored and recorded for behavioral anomalies. Vendors should never have their own VPN or remote access technology just for themselves. These represent unmanaged pathways into your environment with unmitigated risks.

• Segment Networks and Enforce Micro-Segmentation: Even with perfect identity hygiene, poorly segmented networks make lateral movement trivial. OT solutions must leverage the Purdue Model to limit cross-system layered access, isolate vendor sessions, and avoid “flat networks” that can be used for lateral movement or DOS attacks. This is especially true when vendors also have remote access into your OT environment and can “see” everything.

• Continuously Audit, Monitor, and Assess Identity Risk: Identity risk is not static. It isn’t like patching a vulnerability and assuming we are protected. Dormant accounts, forgotten credentials, and expired vendor access can become risk multipliers over time, making continuous discovery, entitlement analysis, and risk-prioritization essential. This includes managing the complete lifecycle for joiner, mover, and leaver processes within the OT environment with the same vigilance used in corporate IT based on change control best practices and entitlement attestation reporting.

Too many organizations treat OT security as a reactive exercise in patching. By ignoring identity as an attack vector, they leave the most exploited pathway wide open. Consider where you are with Privileged Access Management today and let your journey evolve and mature into your OT environment. As your identity posture matures, the transition from reactive “patch-and-protect” to proactive identity centric security and hygiene to remove blind spots before threat actors can exploit them.

In today’s world, identity is not just part of the perimeter; it has become the perimeter. In the convergence of industrial OT and IT, neglecting identity risk is no longer an option. A mature, privilege-centric, identity-first security strategy is not just smart—it is essential for survival of your organization.

Click here to read more about how Privileged Remote Access can help you secure vendor, operator, and machine identities in industrial environments, or see how BeyondTrust supports identity-first security across the OT/IT boundary here.