Operational technology (OT) asset management is the foundation of any effective cyber-physical systems (CPS) security program. Comprehensive asset management provides the visibility needed to understand every device, system, application, and machine-to-machine communication path that supports critical operations. From industrial controllers and engineering workstations to building management systems and data center infrastructure, an accurate inventory establishes the baseline for cyber risk management.
From a cybersecurity perspective, OT asset inventories enable organizations to identify assets running outdated firmware, unsupported operating systems, and software affected by known exploitable vulnerabilities. By enriching asset inventories with vulnerability intelligence and contextual information, security teams can prioritize remediation based on operational criticality, reducing risk while minimizing disruption to production.
Asset management also reveals how systems communicate across the OT environment, mapping trusted relationships and network pathways that attackers could exploit to move laterally. This visibility supports the design of effective network segmentation strategies, helping organizations isolate critical assets, enforce least-privilege communications, and limit the blast radius of a compromise.
Beyond vulnerability management and segmentation, OT asset management strengthens incident response, exposure management, compliance, and resilience planning. It provides the operational context needed to make informed security decisions, helping organizations focus resources where cyber risk is greatest while maintaining the availability, reliability, and safety of critical operations.
This guide will take a deep dive into OT asset management. You’ll learn:
What makes up comprehensive OT asset management
The need for a robust OT asset inventory and management strategy
Five essential best practices for OT asset management
What is OT asset management?
OT asset management is a foundational strategy within industrial environments that allows operators, engineers, and cybersecurity teams to gain visibility into connected physical and digital devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), IoT sensors, and supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA). Central to OT asset management is an asset inventory that delivers operational and security information relative to these specialized industrial and manufacturing environments.
Key Features of OT Asset Management
Asset discovery and visibility: Passive and active traffic collection from OT assets that helps operators identify legacy and proprietary assets with minimal disruption to physical production processes.
Device inventory: A catalog of assets based on device information such as product and serial numbers, firmware versions, configurations data, and geographic distribution of assets. Inventories should also include mappings of known vulnerabilities to assets in production, as well as similar mappings to compliance frameworks to improve reporting.
Lifecycle tracking: OT assets are designed to be part of environments for decades; OT asset management should include hardware tracking capabilities that monitor performance and maintenance history that informs predictive analytics systems and prevents unexpected downtime.
OT versus IT Asset Management: Key Differences in Maintaining an OT Asset Inventory
OT asset management is vastly different from oversight on an IT network and endpoints. Those include:
1. Critical Operating Environments
OT asset management is particularly important because these assets are typically used in critical infrastructure sectors, often have direct control of physical processes, and their failure can have physical impacts, including safety risks. IT assets on the other hand are used mainly for information processing and business operations. They are dominant in office environments and are responsible for tasks like data management, software development, and network management.
2. Asset Lifespan
OT assets tend to have long lifespans as industrial sites and other critical infrastructure environments are built to operate many years or even decades. IT assets on the other hand tend to have a shorter lifespan compared to OT assets due to rapid advancements in technology and software, requiring more frequent upgrades and replacement.
3. Increased Interconnectivity
Due to digital transformation and the rise of IoT, IIoT, and IoMT, OT systems are increasingly connected online, introducing new risks and asset management challenges. IT assets on the other hand are almost always networked internally and to the public internet. IT asset management, therefore, places a strong emphasis on network management and cybersecurity.
4. Risk & Compliance
Due to their impact on physical processes, OT systems must comply with stringent industry-specific standards and regulations related to safety, performance, and reliability. Although IT systems also have to comply with regulations, requirements are much more broadly applicable and typically focus on data privacy, copyright law, and cybersecurity.
5. Security Vulnerabilities
OT assets are built with a focus on physical safety and operational reliability, rather than cybersecurity. Legacy technology and connectivity have expanded the attack surface of OT assets. Unlike OT security, IT security is a more mature field, and has established protocols for things like access controls, firewalls, data encryption, and software vulnerability management.
Why Do You Need a Robust OT Asset Management Strategy?
With a robust asset management strategy, critical infrastructure organizations can tackle critical challenges. Some of the key issues asset management can solve are:
1. Complex OT Environments
OT environments can be incredibly complex with many interconnected systems and processes. With a structured strategy, organizations can categorize and prioritize assets depending on their criticality — simplifying the management process.
2. Lack of visibility
For many organizations, it can become a challenge to track the presence, status, and performance of each asset, leading to inefficiencies, redundancies, and potential failures going unnoticed. With a robust asset management strategy, organizations can achieve comprehensive asset visibility, with a complete inventory and understanding of their respective performances — ensuring you know what you have and how well it's functioning.
3. Evolving Cyber Threats
As the growth of connected technologies expands the attack surface, new exposures and other cyber risks that malicious actors can exploit are created. OT asset management can help mitigate this risk by integrating cybersecurity into the asset management process.
4. Complex Regulatory Landscape
The regulatory environment has become more stringent with non-compliance now resulting in legal consequences, significant fines, and reputational damage. By implementing an OT asset management strategy, organizations can ensure compliance by keeping track of changes in regulations, integrating them into maintenance and operation protocols, and maintaining necessary documentation for proof of compliance.
5. Driving Operational Efficiencies
With many moving parts, OT environments are at the risk of potentially suffering from inefficiencies that can lead to increased operating costs, decreased output, or decreased quality. An OT management strategy can identify and squash these inefficiencies by optimizing the use of assets, scheduling regular maintenance to prevent unexpected breakdowns, and utilizing analytics to drive continuous improvement.
From ensuring operational continuity and cybersecurity to meeting regulatory requirements, the importance of OT asset management cannot be overstated. However, the consequences of poor OT asset management can be even more far-reaching. This includes the potential for asset failures that can lead to operation downtimes, lost production, and in certain cases, safety risks. As a result, a robust OT asset management strategy is paramount for critical infrastructure organizations that depend heavily on OT operations.
5 Essential Best Practices for OT Asset Management
When managing OT assets and other cyber-physical systems, organizations must strike a balance between maximizing operational efficiency, maintaining secure and sustainable operations, and ensuring regulatory compliance. To make this possible, organizations can begin with the following five essential best practices to guide OT asset management strategy:
1. Establish a Comprehensive OT Asset Inventory
The foundation of effective OT asset management is a comprehensive and current inventory of all assets. It's vital to know what assets you have, where they're located, what their status is, and how they function. With a highly detailed, centralized inventory of all assets, organizations can identify redundant assets, ensure efficient use of resources, and prioritize maintenance or upgrades.
2. Continuously Monitor for Operational Risks
By continuously monitoring and correlating your assets and operations with the latest vulnerability, end-of-life status, and other exposures your organization can gain real-time insights into asset performance and potential security issues. Staying on top of asset activity will also help you detect anomalies faster, improve response times to potential issues, and avoid unplanned downtimes.
3. Conduct Regular Vulnerability Assessments
Conducting regular assessments is critical to efficient OT vulnerability management. This will allow your organization to identify weaknesses in your OT environment before they can be exploited. By correlating your asset inventory with the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) system and other weaknesses, organizations can pinpoint vulnerable assets and uncover the risk blindspots in their OT environment.
4. Optimize Workflows Via Reporting and Integrations
Reporting is imperative for understanding the state of your OT assets and making informed decisions about asset allocation, maintenance, and replacement — and even provides the necessary documentation for audits and regulatory compliance. While integrations with CMDB, CMMS, and other inventory management tools can enable you to further optimize workflows with your existing tech stack.
5. Ensure Regulatory Compliance
Many critical infrastructure sectors are subject to strict regulatory requirements relating to safety, emissions, data privacy, and more. As a best practice, organizations should expand their asset management strategy and ensure compliance by keeping track of changes in regulations, integrating them into maintenance and operation protocols, and maintaining necessary documentation for proof of compliance.
Future-proofing Operations with OT Asset Management
OT and cyber-physical systems (CPS) protection doesn’t happen without OT asset management—and that starts with visibility, and device information collections that inform asset inventories.
Inventories are fundamental to OT cybersecurity and the integrity, availability, and safety of physical processes in critical infrastructure environments. An inventory must be organized, regularly updated, physically validated, and tied to an OT-specific taxonomy to be accurate or defensible. This distinction is critical because, in reality, the documentation rarely corresponds to the physical operations.
The Claroty Platform is a comprehensive security solution that not only helps organizations reduce OT cyber risk, but also achieve faster time-to-value and lower operational costs. Asset management is the structural foundation of the platform, delivering precise device attributes that eliminate the need for guesswork and manual verification when patching or mitigating risks.
Risk scoring is also applied based on business impact, giving operators the opportunity to prioritize remediation and mitigation based on outcomes rather than vulnerability criticality, for example.
Talk to a Claroty expert to learn more about OT asset management and how the Claroty Platform can help.
