Among the key findings published by Gartner in this Market Guide is that “the acceptance of OT security products by buyers is moderate, due to the mission-critical nature of OT environments, uneven levels of client maturity and pace of IT/OT integration”.

“Radiflow has faced similar challenges with our customer interactions where operations managers were forced to delay the field deployment of OT security solutions due to higher operational priorities,” explained Ilan Barda, CEO of Radiflow. “Recently, we interacted with an industrial enterprise that had previously abandoned a critical OT security project due to the lack of OT security experts working it its SOC, while another critical infrastructure operator that had just deployed IT firewalls to segregate its OT network did not activate its industrial deep packet inspection capabilities due to the lack of internal ICS know-how.”

In this Market Guide report, Gartner recommends that “security and risk management leaders focused on industrial Internet of Things and OT security should identify key OT assets and systems, as well as potential vulnerabilities, and prioritise security processes and controls, based on recognised threats to OT and IT systems.” In addition, Gartner recommends these security and risk management leaders also “conduct OT risk assessments based on security requirements in correlation with the level of maturity of your security practice and OT technology ecosystem”.

In what the company sees as alignment with this recommendation, Radiflow offers a security assessment service. Since the launch of this service last year, Radiflow has already performed dozens of security assessments, assisting the company’s critical infrastructure operator customers in mapping vulnerabilities and defining a roadmap for deploying effective security measures in their OT networks.