Industrial cyber governance is at a tipping point as legacy models have largely been unable to keep pace with converging IT, OT, cloud, and AI-driven control systems. Treating cybersecurity as a compliance discipline is an impractical approach anymore in a world where cyber incidents lead to safety incidents, production loss, and a rolling supply chain disruption. IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report highlights breaches involving critical infrastructure as some of the most costly, further highlighting the importance of governance models that anticipate operational risk, rather than audit readiness.
Increased regulatory pressure is pushing this transformation forward. The EU’s NIS2 Directive will be introduced alongside U.S. disclosure requirements and expanding CISA guidance, assigning cyber risk accountability directly to boards and senior officers. Governance is evolving toward executive accountability, with resilience measurements, incident preparedness, and recovery capability being more regularly integrated into expectations of leaders and directly tied to leader performance.
For industrial operators, the harder task is converting cyber exposure into defensible investment decisions. Quantified risk approaches, promoted by the World Economic Forum, are gaining traction by linking potential downtime, safety impact, and financial loss to capital planning and insurance strategy. This reframes OT security spending as a risk mitigation measure with measurable business value, rather than a discretionary cost.
Human factors remain central. Workforce training, operational discipline, and a safety-first culture are what determine if governance structures result in actual resilience in practice. Simultaneously, increasing algorithmic control and automation are expanding systemic risk. Workforce training, operational discipline, and a safety-first culture are what determine if governance structures result in actual resilience in practice. Industrial cyber governance will ultimately be judged by resilience under pressure, not the volume of policies on paper.
As industrial organizations continue to innovate, Industrial Cyber reached out to industrial cybersecurity experts to throw light on how cyber governance architectures should evolve to bring cybersecurity, operational safety, and business risk together within a unified decision-making framework over the next 12 to 18 months.
“Governance should shift to a unified IT/OT risk council where safety engineers and CISOs share a common language of operational impact,” Paul Shaver, global practice leader at Mandiant’s Industrial Control Systems/Operational Technology Security Consulting practice, told Industrial Cyber. “Organizations should integrate OT-specific safety metrics into the standard IT risk framework to ensure cybersecurity decisions are made with production uptime in mind. This evolution requires aligning IT’s data confidentiality goals with OT’s requirement for high availability and human safety.
He recognizes that by merging these priorities, leadership can make holistic decisions that protect the entire enterprise attack surface.
Peter Jackson, a principal industrial consultant at Dragos, told Industrial Cyber that industrial cyber governance should be addressed through enterprise-wide risk management disciplines with appropriate domain specificity.
“Boards and senior leadership should treat industrial cybersecurity as a standing element of GRC, recognizing that operations are often the core business and that cyber risk carries safety, environmental, and financial consequences,” Jackson highlighted. “Traditional likelihood-by-consequence approaches struggle with low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios, so leading organizations establish dedicated industrial cyber risk programs with accountable executive sponsorship, defined roadmaps, and integration into planning and budgeting processes. Success depends on collaboration across IT, OT, engineering, safety, and cybersecurity functions.”
Organizations need to move from siloed governance to a risk-first model that prioritizes the most critical threats, whether cyber or operational, and updates policies dynamically based on risk assessments, Jacob Marzloff, president and co-founder at Armexa, told Industrial Cyber. “A shared risk matrix across teams enables consistent trade-offs for safety and cybersecurity. Oversight should be centralized through a cross-functional Risk Committee rather than a single leader, ensuring expertise from IT, engineering, and operations. This committee creates a feedback loop between real-world risks and governance, building resilience.”
Patrick Miller, president and CEO at Ampyx Cyber, said to elevate cybersecurity for all critical technologies (both OT and IT) to the risk register at the board level. “It’s time organizations recognize the potential for crippling loss from a cyber event,” he told Industrial Cyber.
The executives address how structural reforms and incentive models can hard-wire cyber resilience into executive accountability, pushing leadership oversight beyond box-ticking compliance and toward clear, measurable performance outcomes.
Shaver outlined that to move beyond ‘check-the-box’ compliance, leadership must be held accountable for operational resilience metrics, such as the Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) of a production line after a cyber event.
“Executive incentives should be tied to the successful implementation of core hygiene, including verified asset inventories and the elimination of unauthorized remote access points,” he added. “Structural reforms should include regular ‘consequence-based’ reporting to the board, shifting the focus from abstract threats to measurable production risks. When cyber-resilience is treated as a performance KPI, security becomes a business enabler rather than a cost center.”
Jackson observed that incentives are powerful drivers of resilience, but vanity metrics and tick-box compliance are insufficient. “More advanced organizations use balanced scorecards, including control effectiveness, time to detect/respond/recover, validated recovery objectives, exercise participation, roadmap delivery, and stakeholder satisfaction from operations as customers of ICS security services.”
Structurally, he pointed out that more CISOs and heads of OT security are operating as executive-level risk leaders with clearer board visibility. “The direction of travel is toward accountability for outcomes, not simply activity.”
“Tie executive and business unit bonuses to cyber KPIs, similar to safety programs. Metrics should include training compliance, time since last incident, incident response drill success rates, and risk assessment completion,” Marzloff said. “With cyber incidents now reportable to the SEC, visible recognition and a cyber equivalent of Behavioral Safety Programs reinforce desired behaviors. Making resilience a reportable metric ensures leaders are rewarded or penalized based on outcomes, not just the absence of breaches.”
Miller said that there are plenty of existing executive accountability methods, usually reporting to the CEO and board. “Add resilience to this mix. Consider using the model in use for the safety program expectations.”
The executives explore how next-generation governance strategies can make risk-and-consequence modeling truly actionable, turning technical exposures into board-level intelligence that informs investment and policy decisions.
“Next-generation governance turns technical vulnerabilities into ‘dollars and downtime’ projections that resonate at the board level,” Shaver said. “By mapping specific gaps—like a lack of network segmentation—to the potential loss of a specific production cell, security teams can clearly justify the ROI of defensive investments. This requires building a comprehensive understanding of the attack surface and using tabletop exercises or cyber ranges to simulate how a compromise would propagate.”
He identified that actionable intelligence is created when a technical risk is translated directly into its ultimate impact on the physical process and the bottom line.
“Risk modeling becomes actionable when it drives investment and prioritization decisions rather than existing only in registers,” Jackson said. “Technical exposures must be translated into business language that connects consequence, risk tolerance, and funding. Extending familiar business tools such as bow-tie analyses or process hazard analysis to cyber-initiated scenarios helps explain how safeguards may be affected and which barriers mitigate specific consequences. Decision-makers need results framed around risk thresholds and risk-proportionate investment rather than abstract technical detail.”
Marzloff mentioned that governance must translate technical vulnerabilities into business consequences. “Tools like Cyber Bowtie Modeling visually map threats, consequences, and barriers, making risk intuitive for boards. Dynamic models tied to real-time data show when exposures exceed tolerable risk levels, enabling informed investment and policy decisions that target high-consequence scenarios.”
“Board-level intelligence comes in the form of business risk language,” Miller said. “Translating security and resilience metrics into real expenses and losses will make things actionable and useful for investment and policy decisions.”
With mandates such as NIS2, NERC CIP, TSA directives, and other global regulatory frameworks tightening oversight, the executives analyze how industrial organizations are adjusting their governance models to stay agile amid increasingly fragmented regulatory environments.
Organizations are moving away from managing individual regulations like NIS2 or NERC CIP in isolation and are instead adopting a ‘comply-once, satisfy-many’ framework based on unified technical controls, Shaver said. “By focusing on fundamental security hygiene—such as building defendable perimeters and robust IR plans—companies create a resilient baseline that naturally meets most global mandates. This centralized approach allows firms to manage actual risk rather than chasing shifting regulations.”
“The most mature organizations anchor on a strong internal governance model and then map regulatory obligations onto it, rather than rebuilding programs around each new rule set,” according to Jackson. “Where necessary, country-specific guidance is layered onto a unified internal baseline. Less mature organizations often operate with minimal adherence to compliance standards. Overall, security and compliance can be related, but they are not synonymous; internal governance maturity ultimately drives resilience more than regulation alone.”
Regular risk assessments can function much like safety reviews, offering a real-time snapshot of cyber risk to inform smarter, data-driven decisions, Marzloff said. “Visual tools like Cyber Bowtie simplify complex scenarios for diverse stakeholders. Mapping regulatory requirements to common frameworks such as NIST CSF reduces duplication and streamlines compliance. Agility comes from clear communication, risk-centric governance, and harmonized frameworks so organizations can adapt quickly without losing sight of compliance,” he added.
Miller said that industrial organizations should be moving away from compliance-by-framework and toward unified governance models that set common forward-looking security outcomes, then map those outcomes to applicable regulations. “This allows them to adapt quickly as new mandates emerge without rebuilding programs from scratch.”
The executives look into how governance strategies can align technical controls with organizational culture and human performance, incorporating lessons from human-centered design and operational resilience.
Shaver assesses that governance is only as strong as the operators who manage the equipment; therefore, strategies must include collaborative, cross-trained teams that respect the culture of the plant floor. “Security controls should be designed to support, not hinder, the operator’s workflow, leveraging human-centered design to make ‘the secure way’ also ‘the easiest way.’
He added that by involving OT staff in creating IR plans and segmentation policies, “you build a culture of shared responsibility and operational resilience. When technical controls align with the reality of daily operations, the workforce becomes an active cyber-aware layer of defense.”
“Technical controls matter, but culture and human performance are decisive. The strongest results emerge when safety and cybersecurity are built in by design, resulting in minimal friction,” Jackson highlighted. “Lessons from mature safety cultures are highly relevant: safety is most effective when it is not treated as a separate ritual but embedded directly into operational briefings and decision-making. Industrial cybersecurity is gradually following this path, moving from separate initiatives toward being an intrinsic part of OT operations.”
Marzloff recognizes that technology alone does not solve governance challenges. “Success starts with trained personnel and strong processes, then layer technical controls. Apply human-centered design to reduce friction and improve adoption. Combine intuitive design, continuous measurement, and clear incentives to embed a culture of safety and cybersecurity. Align frameworks with regulations to stay compliant and resilient.”
“Effective governance should align technical controls with how people actually work, not how policies assume they work,” Miller said. “Organizations are increasingly incorporating human performance principles to design controls that support operators under real-world conditions rather than creating friction.”
As AI-driven automation, digital twins, and predictive analytics transform industrial oversight, the executives focus on what will define an adaptive governance model that balances autonomy, accountability, and trust.
“An adaptive model balances innovation with secure by design principles to protect operational integrity,” Shaver said. “The goal is ensuring that technology can be adopted to improve operational uptime and production outputs while never compromising the core security hygiene that keeps the plant floor running. This balance ensures that while the organization benefits from the speed of innovation, the ultimate responsibility for safety and production remains a core principle.”
Jackson observed that AI, automation, and digital twins will transform industrial oversight, and most organizations are appropriately cautious about the implications of autonomy. “Human-in-the-loop models will dominate in the near term, with AI augmenting human decision-making rather than replacing it. Governance should evaluate whether AI initiatives introduce risk beyond tolerance and, where necessary, apply compensating controls or fail-safes.”
He concluded that recent guidance from CISA and ACSC on AI in OT provides a useful foundation. “Ultimately, adaptive governance strikes a balance between innovation and consequence awareness, aiming to leave operations safer and more resilient than before.”
