For years, OT security discussions started and ended with visibility and firewalls at the edge.

Security leaders couldn’t secure what they couldn’t see, so asset discovery became the defining requirement for OT security programs. If you secured what could come into the OT infrastructure, then everything in the enclave could be trusted. That focus made sense for the time as many organizations lacked a comprehensive understanding of the devices, systems, and connections operating across their industrial environments.

But the market has changed.

Operational technology environments are becoming more interconnected with enterprise IT, cloud services, remote access infrastructure, and third-party providers. As these connections increase, cyber incidents are no longer confined to IT systems. Security failures can disrupt physical operations, affect production, and create safety implications. In this environment, visibility and edge firewalls are no longer sufficient and security leaders need to turn information into action and focus on environment-wide protection, as well as detecting and responding to emerging threats.

Our latest evaluation in this space, The Forrester Wave™: Operational Technology Security Solutions, Q3 2026, reflects this market evolution. We evaluated 11 significant OT security solution providers and found a market increasingly focused on helping organizations understand, prioritize, and reduce operational risk rather than just discovering assets and protecting the edge.

Asset Discovery Is Core to Security, But Not Everything

One notable finding from this evaluation is that asset discovery is no longer a key differentiator among leading OT Security Solution providers.

Most providers now deliver solid visibility and asset identification capabilities. There are varying degrees of what’s provided in that asset discovery, but similar to say endpoint security and antimalware capabilities, this is just one component of the complete stack they offer such as vulnerability & risk management, network segmentation, or secure access management. The more important question for buyers is what happens after those OT assets are discovered.

  • Can the solution uncover all comm paths and align them to operational processes?
  • Can the solution identify meaningful operational risks?
  • Can it prioritize remediation efforts?
  • Can it help security teams understand potential attack paths and close those gaps?
  • Can it support operationally safe responses when incidents occur?

Organizations that continue evaluating OT security solutions primarily on asset inventory capabilities risk investing in technologies that provide awareness without meaningful risk reduction.

OT Risk Prioritization Is Becoming The New Battleground

Due to the nature of device types, operations requirements, connectivity constraints, and safety protocols, industrial environments often contain large volumes of vulnerabilities, exposures, threats, and operational concerns. The challenge is rarely identifying issues. The challenge is determining which issues create meaningful business risk.

The strongest OT security solutions increasingly combine asset intelligence with risk posture management, exposure prioritization, and OT-specific contextual analysis. This allows security and operations teams to focus their limited resources on those weaknesses that could impact safety-critical systems, production processes, or operational resilience, like exploitable vulnerabilities, weak network segmentation, or insecure access. The market’s leading providers are increasingly differentiated by how effectively they translate technical findings into operational risk decisions.

IT And OT Security Integration is Accelerating

A second trend evident throughout our evaluation is the continued integration of IT and OT security operations.

Some organizations are integrating security operations into unified teams and platforms. Others continue to maintain separate IT and OT security functions while sharing intelligence, risk information, and response processes. Regardless of operating model, organizations increasingly expect stronger integration between traditional enterprise security controls and OT-specific security monitoring and response.

This does not mean OT security is becoming an extension of IT security; quite the opposite.

The most effective OT security solutions preserve OT context while enabling collaboration across enterprise security teams. Security leaders should look carefully at how providers support IT/OT integration without compromising the operational realities of industrial environments and how the vendor can operate in a converged security operations infrastructure.

Buyers Should Balance Innovation with Operational Reality

The OT security market remains highly innovative, particularly around AI, automation, threat detection, and exposure management. Innovation is important. But industrial security buyers must evaluate innovation through the lens of operational reliability.

Production lines, hospitals, transportation networks, and critical infrastructure environments have little tolerance for disruption and if the age of this equipment shows anything, it’s that change comes slowly because of operational criticality. Security functionality that cannot operate safely within production environments may create more risk than value. As a result, organizations should balance excitement about new capabilities against proven deployment success, operational resilience, and the provider’s understanding of industrial environments. Automation can provide relief to a security team, unless that automated action interferes with an industrial process that creates a problem for the operations team.

What Security Leaders Should Do Next

As you evaluate OT security solutions, shift your focus away from visibility alone and ask three fundamental questions:

  • Does the solution help us prioritize and reduce operational risk?
  • Can it support our approach to IT and OT security integration?
  • Will it improve resilience without disrupting operations?

The answers to those questions will ultimately matter more than how many assets the platform can discover.

Asset discovery helped establish the OT security market. Risk reduction, resilience, and secure operational outcomes will define its future.

Forrester clients interested in discussing this evaluations more should connect with us to discuss via an inquiry or guidance session.

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