The Missing Layer in Industrial Cybersecurity: Why Every CISO Needs an OT vCISO

What You'll Discover

Most industrial cybersecurity programs are optimized to pass audits, not survive attacks. Organizations track alerts, vulnerabilities, and compliance status—but none of these answer the only question leadership actually cares about: will operations stay running during a cyber event? This gap between technical reporting and operational reality is where risk hides—and where most security strategies fail.

Modern attacks don't "break into OT." They move through it. Starting in IT, leveraging identity, remote access, and trusted connections, attackers follow paths that were intentionally built for business operations. Traditional tools rarely detect this movement because they validate controls in isolation, not the full attack chain that spans IT and OT environments.

The biggest failure point isn't tooling—it's ownership. In many organizations, no one is clearly accountable for cyber risk that impacts production, safety systems, or revenue continuity. This creates a blind spot where security exists, but operational risk is unmanaged. The emergence of the OT vCISO role is a direct response to this gap—and the organizations that haven't filled it are operating with structural exposure that no tool can remediate.

Mature organizations are shifting from compliance-driven security to operational visibility. They are implementing governance models that align IT and OT, establishing clear accountability for cyber-physical risk, and enabling executives to see risk in business terms—downtime, safety impact, and financial exposure—rather than technical metrics. The OT vCISO is the leadership layer that makes this shift possible.

In this webinar, Terry McCorkle and Chris Weule break down what separates organizations that pass tests from organizations that survive incidents—and show exactly how the OT vCISO bridges the gap between perceived security and real-world readiness. If you're a CISO, VP of Operations, or security leader responsible for industrial environments, this is the conversation that reframes everything you thought you knew about OT risk.