A CISO’s role in manufacturing and industrial operations has changed. So have the stakes.
In 2024, there was a 71% increase in threat actors targeting manufacturing, according to research from Forescout’s Vedere Labs. Manufacturing remains the most targeted industry by cybercriminals for the last four years straight, per data from IBM.
As a security leader, you’re no longer simply managing the organization’s digital infrastructure. You’re protecting the business.
Continuity, revenue, reputation, and competitive advantage all depend on your ability to identify critical threats in time and reduce risk at scale.
You’re doing it under pressure with limited resources and an attack surface that expands across the entire supply chain. And not to mention, a regulatory environment that increasingly holds leadership accountable.
A vulnerable device somewhere on your production floor, unseen, unmanaged, unnoticed, isn’t just a technical issue anymore. It’s a risk that can quickly turn into lost revenue, leadership pressure, and occasionally, personal liability.
Every Security Flaw Has an Unknown Price Tag
The ‘good news’? It’s coming out of your business, not your budget. In today’s hyper-connected industrial world, the line between IT and OT has vanished, but the silos in the organization are still there. They show up in the form of misaligned processes, outdated policies, third-party risk, or the usual suspects … An unmanaged IoT device, an IP camera managed by contractors, or a wireless router no one’s monitoring. This fragmentation is already putting your business at risk, silently undermining resilience and creating failure points you may not even be aware of… Until it’s too late.
The Biggest Risk Is Always the One You’re Ignoring
Sure, malware, ransomware, and state actors make the headlines and keep you awake at nights, but it’s the exposure already inside your environment that poses the greatest threat to your business. Because the biggest threats aren’t always the ones making noise, often they’re the ones hiding in plain sight like:
- Risk you can’t see
- Threats you can’t prioritize
- Response times that can’t keep up
While attackers move at machine speed, most organizations still take over 30 days to respond, some over 90. Too many tools, too many silos, and too many manual handoffs make it hard to act with speed or confidence. These gaps don’t just slow down your team, they quietly raise your exposure, day by day.
Get a deeper understanding of today’s device risk from Forescout’s Vedere Labs research on “The Riskiest Devices of 2025.”
Do You Know Where You Stand in Your Security Maturity Journey?
Knowing where you are is the first step to understanding the risk you’re carrying and what it could cost your business, your team, and your reputation. You should ask yourself:
- Are you making informed decisions or just working with the version of reality that gets reported to you?
- Are your metrics board-ready?
- Do you have solid KPIs to measure the true impact of your strategy?
Takepoint’s New Benchmark Study Reveals What CISOs Are Truly Up Against
The “Industrial Cybersecurity Global Benchmark 2025” by Takepoint reveals just how wide the gap is between detection and action. While attackers accelerate, most organizations are still held back by complexity, fragmentation, and blind spots. If you’re not sure where you stand, you’re not alone. But there is good news, you’re not out of options.
Source: Industrial Cybersecurity Global Benchmark 2025
What Questions Should You Be Asking?
From unmanaged risk to misplaced priorities and slow response, too many security programs focus on what’s visible, instead of what’s critical. These aren’t just operational gaps, they’re strategic blind spots. This is your chance to step back, reassess, and ask: are we actually securing what matters?
Visibility That Uncovers Risk Beyond an Inventory
You don’t need a list of assets. You need to know what’s putting your business at risk right now and why it matters. Eighty-five percent of organizations in the Takepoint survey rely on 3 to 5 different tools just to have visibility across the devices in their environment. That means juggling integrations, dealing with duplicate or conflicting data, and hoping everything still works after the next upgrade. Not to mention the licensing complexity and the hidden cost of keeping it all together.
Does your organization have the ability to:
- See what’s connected, who’s using it, and how it’s behaving, in real time?
- Detect unmanaged, unknown, and forgotten devices before they introduce risk?
- Manage the entire device security lifecycle, from installation to decommissioning?
Everyone Shows You Risk, Nobody Tells You Where to Start
Most security failures don’t happen because your team missed a threat, they happen because they were busy working on the wrong one. When everything looks urgent, it’s easy to get buried in noise while the real risk slips by unnoticed. What’s the point of detecting every threat if you don’t know which one to fix first?
The survey results are alarming: nearly 60% of respondents report low confidence in their ability to detect threats across IT and OT, and about one-third say they struggle to identify which ones actually matter. You might think this is a job for AI, but what does GenAI really know about your business?
Does your organization have the ability to:
- Cut through alert noise and focus on what could disrupt operations or revenue?
- Rank risks by impact and criticality, not just severity scores?
- Connect the dots between vulnerabilities, business functions, and real consequences?
Response That Keeps Up
Detecting and prioritizing what can put your business at risk is only the beginning. Once you understand what matters most and where to focus, your ability to respond at scale becomes a true competitive advantage. It’s the difference between staying ahead of risk or constantly catching up.
If your response lags, exposure grows while your team is still trying to triage the last chain of events. According to the survey, 26% of organizations mention limited resources as a key barrier but this isn’t a problem more headcount alone can fix. Staying ahead or risk takes a smarter and more strategic approach.
Does your organization have the ability to:
- Contain compromised assets or segments in real time, before damage spreads?
- Automate routine actions across tools, reducing response times and human error?
- Manage risk and compliance when threats move faster than your team can respond?
Security Is a Journey
Every organization is different. You all have unique industrial systems with different types of risk. But the challenges many security leaders face are surprisingly similar. Visibility gaps, alert overload, and slow response times aren’t just operational hurdles — they’re signs your security program isn’t where it needs to be.
Risk doesn’t wait for you to catch up. And resilience isn’t just about how many tools you’ve deployed, it’s about how understand risk, decide, and act.
Wondering how your security maturity stacks up?
Download the Industrial Cybersecurity Global Benchmark 2025 from Takepoint and find out how your peers are dealing with the same visibility gaps, prioritization challenges, and response delays. The report surveyed 236 security and operational leaders. Takepoint Research is an analyst firm focused exclusively on industrial cybersecurity.