As the manufacturing sector increasingly adopts digital transformation, cybersecurity has become a core requirement, not just for protecting assets but for ensuring continuity, resilience, and long-term competitiveness. These themes took center stage at the inaugural Industrial Cyber Days Manufacturing 2025 online event, where cybersecurity leaders from global manufacturers, technology providers, and regulatory bodies gathered to discuss the evolving landscape of manufacturing cybersecurity strategies.
Industrial Cyber Days Manufacturing 2025 was held virtually across three regions, starting with the Americas on May 13, EMEA on May 20, and APAC on June 3. Designed by practitioners, for practitioners, the event brought together the global industrial cybersecurity community to tackle the complex challenges of securing digital manufacturing.
This edition featured more than 50 expert speakers and 40 sessions over three days, highlighting themes of resilience, compliance, innovation, and international collaboration. In addition to panel discussions and keynotes, the event included exclusive training sessions tailored to operational technology environments. Part of an annual series, Industrial Cyber Days serves as a platform for cybersecurity leaders, practitioners, and policymakers to share practical insights and address emerging risks in critical infrastructure.
From process safety to strategic resilience
“Process safety and cybersecurity must go hand in hand. One impacts the other,” said Josie Houghton, cyber and ICS security lead for Rolls-Royce SMR. “You can’t talk about keeping people and plants safe without securing the digital systems that control them.”
Cybersecurity in manufacturing is increasingly recognized as inseparable from operational safety. Throughout the event, speakers emphasized the criticality of aligning cyber risk with process safety. This shift, from IT-centric security toward integrated industrial risk management, underscored that protection must extend beyond digital assets to the physical infrastructure and processes that power production environments.
Leading voices throughout the event called for the fusion of safety, reliability, and security into one cohesive risk posture, supported by leadership across business, engineering, and operations.
Embedding cybersecurity into operational culture
“We have to listen first,” said Manolya Rowe, senior security architect for IoT at Dover Fueling Solutions. “When you go to the operators or the engineers, it’s about earning their trust by understanding their world, not just imposing controls from ours.”
Rather than relying solely on technology, cybersecurity success in manufacturing hinges on the ability to influence culture and behavior across departments. One of the most consistent themes was the importance of trust-building between security teams and operational personnel.
Organizations that successfully embed Manufacturing Cybersecurity Strategies into plant operations do so by aligning initiatives with the language and priorities of production. Security professionals must be fluent in operational realities—knowing when, how, and why changes will affect uptime, throughput, and safety. Real progress often begins with collaboration, not controls.
Aligning with business risk and governance
“Working with the ground people and aligning them with the requirements, as well as talking to the management in terms of negotiating with the right kind of security recommendations for enhancing the capability of the industrial ecosystem,” observed Chitrank Shrivastav, CISO at Envision Energy.
“Success in OT cybersecurity isn’t about reaching a fixed end state,” said Jonathon Gordon, directing analyst at Takepoint Research and Conference Chair, adding that it’s about building programs and relationships that can adapt risk-informed and grounded in the operational realities.”
To transform manufacturing cybersecurity strategies from an afterthought into a strategic asset, organizations must tie them directly to business risk. Several sessions highlighted how cybersecurity governance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, IEC 62443, and NIST CSF, can be leveraged to create structured, scalable programs that are responsive to enterprise risk appetite.
However, effective governance is not achieved through frameworks alone. It requires executive sponsorship, cross-functional ownership, and a shared vision of risk, compliance, and performance. Long-term strategies must balance tactical wins with maturing capabilities over time.
Agility and prioritization in implementation
“You don’t need to solve everything on day one. Just get started,” Claudio Sangaletti, OT leader at medmix, said at the event. “Prioritize based on what’s most critical and build momentum.”
Cybersecurity teams across manufacturing face the challenge of doing more with less, largely constrained by limited budgets, legacy environments, and constrained downtime windows. The event showcased several examples where organizations found creative ways to accelerate progress by prioritizing initiatives based on risk and feasibility.
While perfection was not the goal, disciplined agility, such as decoupling asset discovery from network mapping or focusing on DMZ segmentation first, enabled teams to achieve quick wins that also served broader strategic goals. These experiences underscored that manufacturing cybersecurity strategies often succeed by focusing on what’s achievable now.
Managing the expanding threat landscape
“Threats are moving faster than our legacy detection systems were ever designed to handle,” Rowe said. “We’ve had to rethink what visibility and response really mean on the plant floor.”
Beyond internal gaps, industrial organizations face mounting external threats. State-sponsored attackers, hacktivist groups, and ransomware operations have increasingly targeted the manufacturing sector for its economic and strategic value.
Event speakers pointed to the emergence of hybrid threats, those combining cyber and physical disruption, as a signal that traditional defenses are no longer sufficient. Manufacturers must adopt intelligence-driven manufacturing cybersecurity strategies, improve detection capabilities at the edge, and ensure that threat intelligence informs both policy and operations. Cybersecurity must scale with the complexity of modern threats.
Navigating regulatory and compliance shifts
“One actionable tactic that proved highly effective for us is a cross-functional cybersecurity governance team, where you have legal, risk, compliance, and operations working together to stay ahead of regulatory expectations,” said Adnan Ahmed, head of ICT and CISO at Ornua.
The regulatory landscape for industrial cybersecurity is becoming more complex and demanding. New mandates like the EU’s NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act are reshaping what it means to be ‘secure by default.’
In response, manufacturers must develop continuous compliance strategies that avoid checklist thinking in favor of embedded governance. Success in this area will be measured not just by audits passed, but by how well organizations can demonstrate resilience, response capability, and risk awareness across all layers of their operations. Manufacturing cybersecurity strategies must integrate these evolving expectations.
Dual role of artificial intelligence
“Today, you have a lot more newer, modern AI-powered tools that help with detection, threat intelligence gathering, and sharing,” according to Ram Kumar, a cybersecurity and risk professional at Global Automotive Company.
AI is emerging as both a solution and a threat vector in industrial cybersecurity. Many presenters explored the role of AI in improving threat detection, anomaly identification, and SOC efficiency. However, there was also acknowledgment that adversaries are using AI to increase the speed, scale, and deception of their attacks.
For AI to be a net benefit, manufacturers must ensure that it is applied transparently, with adequate human oversight and accountability. Use cases in predictive maintenance, asset monitoring, and behavioral analytics showed promise, but always with a human in the loop model. These advances are expected to play a vital role in future manufacturing cybersecurity strategies.
Closing the talent gap
“There is a huge talent gap,” said Ravindra S Gotavade, senior domain architect for external OT security at Tetra Pak. “We don’t just need more people—we need people who understand both security and the plant environment.”
No strategy can succeed without the right people. One of the most urgent themes was the scarcity of skilled professionals who understand both OT systems and cybersecurity. Speakers advocated for more investment in cross-disciplinary training, apprenticeships, and knowledge-sharing platforms to accelerate workforce development.
The industry must look beyond traditional IT hiring pipelines and foster talent from engineering, operations, and even trades backgrounds. Cultivating a security-aware workforce at every level, right from the plant floor to the C-suite, will be essential to long-term success in manufacturing cybersecurity strategies.
Toward living cybersecurity programs
“The most effective strategies… evolve with the changing threats, technologies, business pressures, and regulatory environments,” Gordon said. “Static controls won’t cut it.”
The cumulative insight from Industrial Cyber Days Manufacturing 2025 was clear: Manufacturing cybersecurity strategies must evolve from a patchwork of controls into a living, business-aligned capability. This evolution will require sustained leadership, continuous improvement, and an unwavering focus on risk and value creation. These strategies should not be fixed documents, but dynamic programs that respond to new threats, integrate with operations, and reflect a shared vision for safety, performance, and innovation.
