The lifespan of high-value industrial systems is measured in decades. As the industrial internet penetrates into OT environments, the legacy systems may continue to coexist for the foreseeable future. These legacy systems, though connected using gateways, were never built for ubiquitous connectivity, and are thus weak links in the security chain. Any IIoT use case involving brownfield deployments should take special considerations with respect to these legacy systems, and plan for event and activity monitoring, secure updates, and so on, at a minimum.
Greenfields with state of the art IIoT devices and equipment are evolving from being simple patches, becoming more pervasive. As the number of new, modern devices increases, industrial deployments may hit an inflection point in this migration path. Since these new industrial OT systems are also high-value and are meant to last for many years, new device manufacturers should cautiously build these with hardware-based...
