The Role of the OT vCISO
What You're About to Discover
Most OT environments have robust engineering teams, experienced operators, and years of institutional knowledge about how the systems run. What they rarely have is someone whose job is to translate that operational reality into a cybersecurity posture leadership can act on. Security is buried inside IT, assigned to no one, or addressed reactively after something breaks. The uncomfortable truth: without executive-level cybersecurity ownership that understands industrial systems, your OT environment isn't just under-protected. It's unmanaged.
The deeper problem is a mismatch in language and expertise. Traditional CISOs are trained for enterprise IT—frameworks, compliance scores, breach notifications. But in an OT environment, the threat isn't a data breach. It's a plant shutdown, a safety system failure, or a six-month dwell time that ends the moment production does. Applying IT-era thinking to industrial environments that run on decades-old control systems, with zero patch tolerance and uptime requirements measured in years, doesn't create security. It creates the illusion of it while leaving every critical process exposed.
Consider what happens when a ransomware actor targets an energy facility's OT network or an ICS vendor's remote access channel becomes an attack vector. The question isn't whether data was exfiltrated. It's whether the physical process keeps running safely, whether the safety instrumented systems held, and whether anyone knew what to do when the alerts fired at 2 AM. Organizations without dedicated OT security leadership find out what they're missing at exactly the worst moment—when uptime, safety, and business continuity are all on the line simultaneously.
The organizations changing this dynamic aren't necessarily hiring full-time CISOs with rare OT backgrounds. They're leveraging virtual CISOs who bring fractional executive leadership—the strategic oversight, the board-level communication, the incident readiness—without the full-time overhead. And as artificial intelligence reshapes risk management, tabletop readiness, and incident response, the vCISO model is evolving from advisory function to force multiplier. The security leadership gap in OT is closing, but only for the organizations that recognize it exists.
In this episode, host Gary Mullen sits down with Terry McCorkle and Joshua Nicolson to examine what the OT vCISO role actually looks like in practice—the day-to-day responsibilities, the unique challenges of securing industrial environments, and how AI is changing what's possible for security leadership at scale. If you're responsible for securing OT environments, communicating cyber risk to executives, or building a resilient industrial security posture, this conversation will reframe how you think about the leadership layer your organization needs. Is cybersecurity a technical function in your organization, or a leadership discipline?