Manufacturers Bolster OT Remote Access—Yet Third-Party Governance Lags
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Manufacturers Bolster OT Remote Access, Yet Third-Party Governance Lags
The rapid expansion of remote vendor access into industrial control systems, spanning PLCs, HMIs, and SCADA environments, has created a dangerous asymmetry. While manufacturers accelerate toward Zero Trust architectures in response to mounting ransomware threats, the governance frameworks required to manage third-party access at scale remain critically underdeveloped. Secomea's newly released
Detail
report, published July 20 from Copenhagen, reveals that 57% of North American organizations now manage six or more external vendors with direct remote access into operational technology (OT) environments, yet the controls governing those connections lag far behind operational demands.
The structural problem is not that vendors are malicious, it is that organizations are architecting access without architecting governance. When six or more third parties can reach your PLCs and engineering workstations, every unmonitored session becomes a potential vector for lateral movement.
Based on a global survey of 400 senior OT, IT, compliance, and operations leaders across manufacturing and critical infrastructure, Secomea's findings expose a sprawling vendor ecosystem that most organizations are ill-equipped to govern. The 57% figure for North America, organizations managing six or more external vendors with OT remote access, represents a structural dependency that has outpaced security maturity.
Each vendor connection touches sensitive industrial assets: PLCs running production lines, HMI panels controlling batch processes, SCADA servers managing entire plant floors. The attack surface has expanded proportionally, yet the governance layer has not kept pace.
of North American organizations manage six or more external vendors with remote OT access
Vendor sprawl, weak credential practices, and fragmented tooling identified as the top three structural gaps
Perhaps the most unsettling finding in the report is what Secomea terms the "confidence-to-evidence gap." Most organizations rate their session visibility and regulatory readiness as "good", yet deeper analysis reveals that full vendor session auditability remains uncommon. Confidence, the data suggests, is being mistaken for actual security posture.
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