OT Cybersecurity Risk Elevates within Executive Leadership Ranks

• 11 Jul 2025
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, announced the findings from its global 2025 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report. The results represent the current state of operational technology (OT) cybersecurity and highlight opportunities for continued improvement for organizations to secure an ever-expanding IT/OT threat landscape. In addition to trends and insights impacting OT organizations, the report offers best practices to help IT and OT security teams better secure their cyber-physical systems.

“ The seventh installment of the Fortinet State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report shows that organizations are taking OT security more seriously. We see this trend reflected in a notable increase in the assignment of responsibility for OT risk to the C-suite, alongside an uptick in organizations self-reporting increased rates of OT security maturity. Alongside these trends, we’re seeing a decrease in the impact of intrusions in organizations that prioritize OT security. Everyone from the C-suite on down needs to commit to protecting sensitive OT systems and allocating the necessary resources to secure their critical operations,” said, Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President, Products and Solutions, at Fortinet

Key findings from the global survey include:

Responsibility for OT security continues to elevate within executive ranks: There has been a significant increase in the global trend of corporations planning to integrate cybersecurity under the CISO or other executives. As accountability continues to shift into executive leadership, OT security is elevated to a high-profile issue at the board level. The top internal leaders who influence OT cybersecurity decisions are now most likely to be the CISO or CSO by an increasingly wide margin. Now more than half (52%) of organizations report that the CISO/CSO is responsible for OT, up from 16% in 2022. For all C-suite roles, this has spiked to 95%. Additionally, the number of organizations intending to move OT cybersecurity under CISO in the next 12 months has increased from 60% to 80% in 2025.

OT cybersecurity maturity is affecting the impact of intrusions: Self-reported OT security maturity has made notable progress this year. At the basic Level 1, 26% of organizations report establishing visibility and implementing segmentation, up from 20% in the previous year. The largest number of organizations state their security maturity is at the Level 2 access and profiling phase. The report also found a correlation between maturity and attacks. Those organizations that report being more mature (higher of Levels 0–4) are seeing fewer attacks or indicate that they are better able to handle lower-sophistication tactics, such as phishing. It’s worth noting that some tactics, such as advanced persistent threats (APT) and OT malware, are difficult to detect, and less mature organizations may not have the security solutions in place to determine they exist. Overall, although nearly half of organizations experienced impacts, the impact of intrusions on organizations is declining, with a noteworthy reduction in operational outages that impacted revenue, which dropped from 52% to 42%.

Adopting cybersecurity best practices is having a positive impact: In addition to the Levels of maturity affecting the impact of intrusions, it appears that adopting best practices such as implementing basic cyber hygiene and better training and awareness are having a real impact, including a significant drop in business email compromise. Other best practices include incorporating threat intelligence, which spiked (49%) since 2024. Additionally, the report saw a significant decrease in the number of OT device vendors, which is a sign of maturity and operational efficiency. More organizations (78%) are now using only one to four OT vendors, which indicates that many of these organizations are consolidating vendors as part of their best practices. Cybersecurity vendor consolidation is also a sign of maturity and corresponds to Fortinet customer experiences with the Fortinet OT Security Platform. Unified networking and security at remote OT sites enhanced visibility and reduced cyber risks, leading to a 93% reduction in cyber incidents vs. a flat network. The simplified Fortinet solutions also led to a 7x improvement in performance through reductions in triage and setup.